Piecemeal

@Chuckers Hey there! I looked through the files because I didn't recall writing anything akin to the nature of your experience. This is the closing dialog from the vigilante ending if you fail Pathogen's mission: (Bolded to help show that I tried to wordplay around this sentiment you're experiencing) This is the closing dialog from the vigilante ending if you intentionally break quarantine: The closest thing I could find to your experience comes from the Hazmat Commander, who is a stiff who sees the world is black and white. If you fail, he says: And if you break quarantine on purpose, he says: I even did a whole directory search on the working files and didn't find the word coward anywhere. I'm sorry that was your takeaway from the mission/arc, but it wasn't designed to be failed! If you can get away from the first ambush after Pathogen and leave them alive, they'll womble after you slowly, so take a look for those glowies ahead of time and beeline to them. It's not that bad!

I wanted to address some of the travel comments in this arc and wanted to throw my justifications in the ring. (Just this one time guys... I promise!) The investigation of Pierce was an exercise in letting the player feel like a detective. Content within notwithstanding, the idea was to get a player to slow down and absorb some context of the world they play in. I took the opportunity to write in several little side stories that make you think more about the world you're playing in, which, as far as I am concerned, has some of the richest lore I've ever played through. I missed the mark several times in beta with the hunts, underestimating the player hatred for them, but was sure to write in plot justifications (Watkins' go-to's in the Bureau were busy or reassigned, causing him to tactically pivot to street sweeping with their mohawks.) As for the travel time with Pierce's investigation, I was happy to write in some more content that was incidental but enriching - Julius was the most wrong of the four avenues, but you have tiny little conditional dialog choices if you've arrested Atta or completed the Cavern trial. I also tried to shed some light on Watkins' involvement in helping Julius get rehabilitated from Superadine, giving more dimension to both characters. The troll hunt was a natural extension of that conversation that could be taken care of on the way back, and while it yielded no results, it pointed you to Jacob Sloan, a psychological casualty of the second Rikti War when they took over his studio and he made a break for it to save his life, like George Costanza at a kid's birthday party when a fire breaks out. Suddenly the human toll on the war becomes a little more obvious. I'll admit that the end-goal of the exercise was a personal pet peeve of mine - why do those worthless callboxes even *exist* in this city? Who are they calling? What good can they really do? So the callboxes were given an extra layer of practical use and thus a better justification for their existence. I wanted to answer that question of "what the heck is their point?" and wrote into the story that these callboxes are also emergency radar nodes to track anonymous movement data after major crimes are reported. If you read through the clues, Pierce mentions the callboxes twice and you also get repetition on going south in the dialog, so choosing the callboxes ends up being the shortest route. As far as the distance traveled patrolling, well, I do apologize if it feels kind of long - the radar data needed to be triangulated, and those first three callboxes were actually in a triangle. I added the fourth one personally to learn how to do so, and placed it mostly in the nexus of the other three. In the future, this mechanic will be refined into smaller ventures. But as I've said before and will happily say again, this was a 12-month learning experience and I was enthralled by the fact that pretty much everything I ever thought about adding was doable. (It got addicting) Truly, this is the most versatile engine in terms of making things happen, sometimes. Don't ask about the arena code. JUST DON'T.

It should only require the Doc Delilah souvenir, as I wrote the code and am looking at it now. But I won't complain if people run all those arcs, you get Yin Enhancements at the end of it and can use the upgrade button to keep them forever.

And yes, the illusions were oops'ed on rewards. Added in.

I saw this on discord and went to work immediately. A few things have already changed in the pipe to fix all your outstanding issues: 1) Viral Cocktail rolled back to reduce only 10 endurance. 2) The Medical Research buffs in Pathogen's fight room (and everywhere else) are there to help with the debuff. I'd recommend leaving those in his room for part two of his fight, and then stacking them up when he shows - to have the muster to hand him his butt. They're now greatly offsetting the debuff so the fight will be easier. They last for a full minute and stack. 3) Cortex has had his damage rebalanced. I specifically went and made a local testing character named Gavric, a Rad/Energy Sentinel, and went into the Cortex mission with only a handful of regular damage IOs at 25 and nothing else. It was the right kind of difficult against that testing metric, and should be very doable now. A lot of those errors were on me, but based on balancing them against Mind Stab, which was an OG power and way out of balance. Damage numbers and recharges have changed and his primary-use powers should be controls and ranged attacks. 4) The Cortex illusion spawns, solo, show up in smaller numbers. I'll look and see why they're not rewarding anything, though. That's odd. I might have built him off a summoned Rikti monkey, which doesn't award XP because the Comms officer awards greater XP instead.

I am looking into this - it's been a thorn in my side, and I'm about to deploy a nuclear option to the spawns 🙂

This may have been caused by legacy code, which I have removed, and *may* fix the problem. I apologize for the inconvenience.

You know... I apologize. I wrote that note in my commit message, meaning it to be less of a blast up the keester in terms of difficulty. I think you took the intended meaning as something more inflammatory. I assure you that was entirely NOT the intent.

Being a supervillain is more than that, friend. It's also creating massive travel times, talk-to's, and disproportionate spawn sizes by accident! #villainforlife #getreadyforthenextarcs #learnedalotsincelaunch

Yes, is it not in the list? *facepalm*

Rollister is Posi2 or OG Posi TF. Dr. Vahz is always.

I want to note that I am not taking this feedback personally, and while the delivery has been rather... blunt, it *WILL* help me craft the part 2 arc better. And the next set(s) of arcs as well. If you want results from me, just remember I am reasonable so long as you are 🙂 And we're all learning this stuff together.

More to the point it looks like I either had a cumulative iterative error, or I whoopsie-rolled-back the changes to a bobo spawndef version.

I mean to say that gearing a mission to solo play creates lackluster experiences for teams - there's a bit of a fine like to walk here. A geared blaster trivializes many things. A solo controller as the basis of balance in mission experience would be... well... just play a Mind/Rad controller solo and then design a mission for that. LOL.

There are things beyond mortal comprehension that seem to defy logic when the compiler goes to town.

This fight calls enemies that already exist to rush the stage - therefore, if you eliminate the majority of the ravers before Raverobber, he doesn't have (m)any friends to call. They can be controlled. That's why their damage isn't spectacular. A plant controller with Seeds basically did away with them. Someone with bonfire is a life-saver. Designing content to be solo'ed is an unrewarding prospect - I've built most of this with teams in mind, to give tanks, controllers, and dominators more things to do.

I understand your position and respect your eloquence in posting about it. The rave is not behaving as intended, and continues to avoid proper discipline. I am looking into what the heck happened in there. But the density is not according to plan. Not everything is perfect in these arcs. You are playing my long-winded technical exercise in learning 30 interconnected systems to make this a reality. Yes, I wrote a lot. I'll even acknowledge and apologize for wanting to give too much context. But there is a fine line between "This is cool" and "What the hell is going on" that hinges on reading comprehension and I'm still finding that line. The "Investigate the Robbery" mission is similarly an exercise in trying something completely new, and if you ask around you can find yourself the right investigation path to knock out 3/4 of the resulting mission(s) and reduce it to a single one. And the Tarnished Star badge, which is getting a lot of mixed feedback, is optional. It rewards content runners at the cost of nothing to the mission. If you're a badge hunter, then you only have like... two arcs to run for souvenirs and you're there. Bear with me folks. Great (and to some, better) things are coming.

I've confirmed this is working, so if you're certain you have all souvenirs, we may have to investigate.

I believe in my dialog tree, in an early version, that branch was called "SpeedRunnersHateReadingThings"

Actually I thought I'd fixed this. I will be looking into this. I don't remember manually massaging the spawn defs into maximum payout for everyone.

I believed that blueside, vigilante or hero, you would turn her over to the authorities because she has not done a single thing that makes her more dangerous than a common civilian. She manipulated you into taking out her allies. And her story continues redside. 😄

If you investigate the right path, you get the shortest path. You can skip 3/4 of that chain 🙂

No you do not get an update from Null. Also please update this list, you need Shauna Stockwell's souvenir. Sun Xiong must be spared. And the original Posi TF counts as well.

Well, he dropped in the middle of a massive warehouse fire. While the place was quarantined by the CDC. He wasn't going to survive no matter how you slice it. Also, catgirls are a closely monitored population and sometimes allowing one into a rave can cause a cascading furpocalypse on the dance floor. So one must be careful.

I snuck in overnight with an oversized GMO of Eochai's head and delicately wrapped his gourdly skin over the globe.