Police Woman

My current idea is that, because people like joining AE farms ... make something that looks like a farm, but sneak an actual story into it. It would basically be a Trojan horse story arc. It would need visually interesting custom characters, lots of stuff to kill for xp, have few or no clues, all story information revealed in NPC dialog that everyone can see. Not sure if this would work, but I'm thinking about trying it.

Thanks very much for this bug report! I was not aware that these arcs had gotten broken, and the root cause was as you suspected, a standard Warriors mob I had included in custom groups used by these story arcs had gotten invalidated. I tested all my other published arcs and found one other arc that was broken (although the third arc was broken due to a custom character somehow getting invalidated, I think because they changed the robotics powerset). FIXED: Talos Vice (arc #1337) Two Tickets to Westerly (arc #1678) Attack of the 50 Foot Villain (arc #46840) Thanks again and let me know if you notice any other problems!

Scenes from the MA team running Bricked Electronics:

Most of the AE story arcs I've played are heavy on mission briefing text, clues and linked objectives, all of which are pretty hard to follow when on a team, so story focused mission architect has seemed more like a solo activity to me. I'm not afraid to start teams, but the only (non-MA) story arcs I really go out of my way to start a team for are Tina McIntyre, Maria Jenkins and Flux's story arcs (because everyone loves beating up Praetorian arch villains, and everyone loves beating up Frostfire). So for solo SFMA content, I mostly post here on this forum to promote it. It's not a great way to reach new people though, because a player reading this forum is presumably already interested in Mission Architect. For team based SFMA content, not sure? What makes a good SFMA story arc for a team? I love doing the Frostfire mission on a big team, but it's closer to a farm (hordes of mobs to kill, lots of exp and levels) than a story (barely any text to read; I guess we have a cut scene where Frostfire tells you he's not just a regular villain, he's actually very Complicated?).

I mostly write comedy. I've dabbled in more serious stories but I'll tend to add easter eggs or in-jokes even in those. I'll play almost anything, but I especially love story arcs with a strong genre theme, and my hero is transported into this story and is immersed in it. I strive to do this in some of my own story arcs, and I'm happiest with the arcs I've written where I feel this is successful.

Our first SPOOOOKY story is Astro Adventures: The Scrapnoids from Outer Space (arc #71) - a retro sci-fi adventure from page 28 of the MA forum. Please note that in-game this is arc #71, not arc #3110 as mentioned in the original post. How do you unpublish an arc and republish it as a lower arc number? I have no idea! We join the astonishing Spacegirl being briefed by the Astro Bounder on a desperate mission to divert a meteor from hitting Paragon City! Arriving on the asteroid, Spacegirl is attacked by aliens! Or robots! Or maybe alien robots! It's the Scrapnoids! Fighting her way past the Scrapnoids, Spacegirl planted several scanners to gather scientific measurements, before returning to Earth. There, Astro Bounder briefs her on the alien Scrapnoid species, and the two of them come up with a plan to tractor beam the asteroid away so that it doesn't hit the Earth. The plan requires Spacegirl to plant some equipment that will distract the Scrapnoids away from Astro Bounder's tractor beaming equipment. Back to the asteroid we go! Only this time we're in caves deep inside the asteroid itself. There's a bunch of weird space junk, as well, that apparently are leftover tech that the Scrapnoids have been using for food, or salvage, or whatever it is that alien robots consume. (They're not really robots, there's some technobabble explaining that they're energy life forms that are animating space junk.) Spacegirl runs into the Vapourian Prime, the brain of the Scrapnoid hive mind! And it's got psychic attacks, which cut through Spacegirl's force fields like butter! Oh wait, no, it looks like force fields work against psychic blast now. Spacegirl is okay! Planting the last of the cannisters of Scrapnoid-bait, Spacegirl teleports back to Earth. Yay, Spacegirl saved the day! Overall impressions: I really liked the retro sci fi aesthetic, and I was glad I picked a character to play that fit right in. The story arc was short (just 2 missions) but it was enough, and the story made sense. Spacegirl had no problem fighting the custom enemy group, even as a solo defender, but she is also a level 50 and heavily IO'd; the arc's stated level range is 1-54, but I would not like to try this as a level 1. The writing for Astro Bounder was very good; there were no real other characters and minimal dialog from the Scrapnoids (since none of them could really talk except the Vapourian Prime). I got turned around a couple times in the cave network which made it frustrating to hunt down all the glowies, but TBH that is my fault for getting lost. There's some clues that are useful and some clues that are just mysterious and make me wonder, but don't appear to lead to anything I was on the fence between rating this 4 or 5; I ended up giving the arc 5 stars. The story arc has been published for over 5 years and had only been played 14 times before this, and would've been very hard to find in the search tool. Give it a try if you're in the mood for a quicky sci-fi adventure.

Answering this hypothetical, I’d say my criteria would be: There has to be a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The story should make sense (it can be magical/superhero/sci fi, but whatever's happening should still make sense) The story should make me care about what happens, or make me feel some kind of way (whether happy, sad, amused, or horrified) The game mechanics should not be tedious (e.g. forcing me to search huge maps repeatedly, defeat all on a huge map, collect 50 items, etc.) The game balance should not overpower or outright murder my character (e.g. multiple ambushes at low level, deadly custom characters, or unkillable AVs) Extra credit for clever writing or presentation.

Meet the Flying Fox! A flying rodent-inspired street vigilante battling the criminal underworld of Paragon City! Flying Fox's loyal butler gave her a list of possible leads, but in her usual brilliant way, she deduces that one of these leads is actually a distraction from the real danger, a Family ship smuggling weapons into Paragon City! Flying Fox is on the case! Left-Handed Leo was a known associate of the Puffin. This leads Flying Fox to search the Puffin's lair, where she finds another clue and gets ambushed by ... the Imperial Defense Force? Weird, but okay! The trail leads to a base on Striga Isle where Flying Fox rescues Full Birdman Junior, a hapless sidekick captured by the IDF. His writing is hilarious. The boy hostage tells me about some kind of portal device, which Flying Fox swiftly disables. By this point there are enough clues pointing to Praetoria that Flying Fox has no choice but to jury-rig another portal device to break into Praetoria and stop the smuggled weapons at the source. There, Flying Fox runs face-to-face with her evil twin! We are not so different, you and I Unfortunately for the evil twin, she has very low perception and Flying Fox starts the fight by sucker-punching her RIGHT in the face. Through some sort of evil cheat code, the evil twin gets back up after being defeated - then demonstrates her brilliant mental ability by running away as fast as she can. Until next time! Same Fox-time, same Fox-channel! After beating my evil twin, I discover she wasn't even the final boss ... the true powerhouse of the story arc is revealed: After defeating the last boss, Flying Fox sets some charges to blow up her evil twin's evil base, then goes home and gives the butler the night off, neatly wrapping up the case. Overall I thought this was amazing and fun. The story arc did a great job of setting the ambience for a Batman-ish adventure. As others have mentioned, it was a little weird to have so much of "my" dialog written for me, but doing this did help give the feeling of being a brilliant detective vigilante. I liked the name drops of alt-Batman-villains and the rivalry with Manticore. I liked how the hero learns from the story arc to give the butler some time off. I gave this story arc 5 stars. Some typos I noticed in the spoiler tag.

Sooo, some observations: I had forgotten how fun it is to play through Mission Architect story arcs. I had gotten into a rut of playing the same canonical PvE content over and over, and mixing it up with some creative MA story arcs was a breath of fresh air. There's a ton of good story-focused content out there in AE, if you can find it. Playing a low level squishy character, I was very sensitive to enemy difficulty. Ambushes were particularly problematic for Arrow Girl. Please don't tie 3 ambushes to a low level boss! At default difficulty that boss is just a lieutenant that I can defeat with 2 attacks - resulting in 3 simultaneous ambushes. As a Praetorian character I could only get to AE via Pocket D (I think?) and on my server there are a lot of AE farmers there. So the AE area often looked really busy, but I don't think that many of the players were doing story-focused stuff. It feels a little sad that there are story arcs published years ago that still only have a handful of play-throughs. I am also kind of amazed that there are some AE authors that have 10 to 50 published story arcs. I guess we have a small but dedicated crowd. I worry a little that my critiques and ratings may be too harsh, but everyone who has responded has been pretty receptive to the feedback. It was fun enough that I'm thinking about my next project to play-through and review arcs ... probably with different characters, maybe with different formats.

Arrow Girl's next adventure was Manhunt (arc #45987) by @Flying Carcass, a level 8-20 Villainous arc where a bank heist goes wrong. My contact is a shady character calling himself Mike Powers who has some unspecified criminal job he wants me to take. Once I agree to this mystery mission, he reveals that it's a fairly standard bank job, only the bank is full of heavy gold bars that need to be teleported out to the getaway van. Meanwhile I'm supposed to escape in a different getaway car. This sounds a little suspicious, but a bank robbery seems like a great opportunity to make a Dark Arrow Girl costume: Arrow Girl fought her way to the vault, defeated the hero protecting it, and attached the gadgets that teleport the gold bars to getaway vehicle #1. As she left the mission, though, we discover that getaway vehicle #2 never showed up, and the police are closing in! Oh no, the contact has screwed her over! Ducking into a nearby building, Arrow Girl beat up some homeless people and some overeager heroes and set off an explosion (using high explosives the Lost were stockpiling for .. reasons) to distract the police. This distracts the police long enough for Arrow Girl to look for a new getaway driver, which involved searching a large outdoor city map looking for one specific hostage. This mechanic is kind of annoying, and the mission itself really didn't make sense to me - what if my villain could fly, superspeed, teleport or stealth away? Then I wouldn't need a getaway driver. (In fairness, Arrow Girl can't do any of these things, because she leveled from 12 to 20 in AE so I didn't take a travel power. But she could still hotwire a car or something!) The streets are full of caped "hero" types, both named and otherwise. Some of the named heroes are kind of fun, and actually have some lines. Finally I track down the getaway driver and "escape"! Having escaped Paragon City, Arrow Girl tracked down her backstabbing contact and gave him a beatdown. And that's the end of the story! Overall I felt this story arc needed more writing; there's barely any text in the briefings, very few clues and each mission was pretty basic (about the same as a typical newspaper mission). It is tagged as "work in progress" so maybe the author intended to add more content later? The first mission briefing has the contact not tell you anything before you agree to do the mission, which feels bad because the plot forces your character to be dumb and walk into this obvious betrayal. I did like the various costumed heroes in mission 3, though I am not sure why a villain who could fly, teleport or stealth would need a getaway car, so the premise of the mission didn't really work for me. The contact is not really developed as a character other than "greedy guy who betrays you". Beating up the contact at the end seemed fine, but I think we should've ended up with the gold bars from the heist in the end, perhaps as an architect souvenir (I don't think the arc gave me one at all). I gave the arc 2 stars. Arrow Girl hit level 21, and finally exited AE and headed back into the real world. Thus ends my project to level up Arrow Girl from 12-20 in Mission Architect! Thanks to everyone who has been following!

Sorry for the long gap - holidays have been eating up a lot of my time. Arrow Girl's next adventure was The Last Full Measure (arc #25396), part 3 of the Ordinary People epic by @cranebump. Following the events of the last arc, Blue Steel sends Arrow Girl to check out a Skullions warehouse where they're holding a lot of contraband tech. While there, Juan Jimenez joins up with her, along with an Operative Demare that is also investigating the theft of Arachnos tech and ... seems trustworthy? Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Despite Demare not being a team player, we manage to confiscate a lot of Rikti tech and vibranium (!) that the Skullions were holding for delivery to Project Orion, a group mentioned in the last story arc. The Arachnos connection from Operative Demare's appearance leads Blue Steel to send Arrow Girl next to clear out an Arachnos base in the nearby sewers. In the sewers, Arrow Girl crosses paths with a mysterious agent of Project Orion. Defeating "Who?" gives me some Project Orion security badges, and clearing out the Arachnos boss scores me some encrypted Arachnos data, though it appears they carelessly left the filenames unencrypted. On the way to the next mission, Blue Steel warns me that "Powers Division" is coming to arrest us all, including Blue Steel and basically every police officer in Kings Row (Freitag, Becktrees, Jimenez and Dempsey are all mentioned)! This ... makes no sense to me. We haven't been doing anything illegal (just investigating Skullions and Arachnos) and it exceeds my sense of disbelief that anyone could trump up enough charges to convince the police to arrest multiple police officers, including the main PPD superhero. On top of that, Blue Steel wants to react to this by stealing and destroying evidence, which does not sound like something an honest cop would do. Nevertheless Arrow Girl goes in and fights the police to steal the evidence. The PPD themselves seem a little surprised by this turn of events. I know, right? Recovering the evidence I finally find out some names of Project Orion people: they all seem to have ties to the (now ruined) Galaxy City, and they have a complex plot that has, apparently, been driving events throughout the Ordinary People epic. This leads Arrow Girl to the Orion base, where she has to fight a rogues gallery of Project Orion bosses, all disgruntled former Galaxy City residents. While there, I discover they've taken Prince Kiros hostage..... or have they?? After narrowly escaping an ambush, the next mission sends Arrow Girl to.... SPAAACE!! It appears Project Orion's master plan is to drop a meteor on Paragon City ... for ... reasons ... revenge! Something like that! Eh, let's go with it, we're going to SPAAAACE! After clearing out some Project Orion lackeys, I round up all the Kings Row heroes (who joined me in SPAAACE) and defeated the big boss. But first, a villain monologue Arrow Girl catches too much aggro and gets defeated twice during this battle, but considering it's the epic finale and in SPAAACE, I'm OK with the difficulty - I probably should've let good old Acrobattle or Whipsmart's bots tank for us. -- Overall thoughts: I had a lot of fun, and the missions were well-crafted, but I thought the plot didn't make much sense. I liked the grand finale in SPAAACE and I liked that all the Kings Row heroes reappeared in the big fight at the end (yes, even Whipsmart). I gave it 4 stars. Arrow Girl ended at about level 20.85. Plot stuff within the following spoiler tag. Some typos I noticed within the next spoiler tag.

Having reached level 20, New Heroes of Paragon (arc #42432) rose to the top of Arrow Girl's SFMA search. This is a level 20-20 hero arc by @Electricboots where you babysit some young heroes and is both a Developer's Choice and a Hall of Fame arc. So Arrow Girl gets sent to look after a group of kid heroes, who have lost a doll and have somehow run afoul of the Hellions. I rescue Loud Girl and start looking for her brother, Super Captain Man. But when I rescue him, something odd happens: My objective is "Bring Miss Loud to Super Captain Man", but ... they're right next to each other now? Completing this objective required me to walk the two of them back to Miss Loud's spawn point, not sure why ... some bugginess with the chained objectives, I assume. After rescuing the two kids and defeating the boss, we still haven't found the doll, so Super Captain Man asks me to rally the troops - running around Steel Canyon to tell the other New Heroes of Paragon to come to their secret base. It was kind of a pain to find the various New Heroes, who were scattered over a large map. However, there were lots of diversions that made it more fun. After rounding up the rest of the team, Arrow Girl got invited to their secret base. While there, we get attacked by a bunch of humanoid sewer rats who were actually ridiculously adorable. The supergroup meeting resolves that we need to uncurse the doll, and to do this we need to get a magic urn from a spoooky cave. It's a g-g-ghost!! The urn is guarded by some ancient being known as Shulkead, who had several tricks up its sleeve and was actually quite well written and fun. This wasn't even its final form After recovering the urn, we finally go on a mission to "uncurse" the magic doll. Arrow Girl has to round up some allies again and perform a complicated magic ritual. Well that's not a good sign. Performing the ritual involves clicking a series of glowies. Something frustrating happened on the last glowy, where it spawned the "final boss" of the story arc, but the New Heroes blocked the doorway so I couldn't reach the boss or even get line of sight; the room I was in wasn't big enough for me to lead my followers away from the doorway. As a result, the kids ended up defeating the final boss before I ever got to see it. Hey, down in front! (Not pictured: another ally pounding the heck out of the final g-g-ghost with a baseball bat) Overall I thought this was quite a fun story arc. The plot was straightforward, but the writing was good (assuming you don't mind taking the role of babysitting a bunch of kid heroes) and there was a lot of set dressing in every map that helped make each mission more interesting. The custom characters were well-done; I liked both the karate punks and the ratkins. The triggered objectives seemed a little buggy (I think freeing Miss Loud first in the first mission ended up breaking the chained objectives, along with the allies blocking the door in the last mission) but I don't think these are necessarily the arc's fault. The allies were pretty overpowered; they spawned as EBs for me, while named enemies were typically bosses or lieutenants, so the allies typically could win without me lifting a finger. I was torn between rating this 4 or 5 stars, ended up giving it 5 stars because of all the good parts. Arrow Girl finished the arc at level 20 and 6/10ths.

Arrow Girl's next adventure was Bridge of Forever: (arc #36642), a level 19-20 Loyalist arc by @Darmian. On this arc, Chimera sends you to investigate the disappearances of several members of Powers Division. As it happens, Arrow Girl is a Praetorian character whose origin story involves working for Chimera, so .... of course I had to make a Chimera ninja themed costume for this arc. On the first mission Arrow Girl teams up with Officer Welks of the PPD to investigate the disappearances. The map starts entirely empty and we start off mostly clicking glowies to get clues, so there was very little fighting, but this actually conveyed the feeling of doing detective work very well. After we found a lot of clues, there was an obligatory ambush, which we defeated handily. After that, Chimera sent Arrow Girl to follow up leads by breaking into a variety of government buildings to steal evidence, generating friction with the other big-name Praetors. This all felt very true to the Praetorian dimension. At one point, while investigating the underground tunnels, I run into Mr. G, who claims to be there on Chimera's behalf to replace another ally who was a no-show. Sure! You look trustworthy! Mr. G helps Arrow Girl with her mission, clearing out ghouls and other sewer trash ... at least for a little while. When we're on the verge of rescuing one of the missing persons, Mr. G turns traitor. I guess I should've expected this. It's another day in Praetoria. After escaping Mr. G's treachery, Chimera sends Arrow Girl to break into one of Mr. G's cloning facilities to find out what he's really up to. And while there, Arrow Girl encounters... Arachnos?! All the clues have been pointing towards the missing supers being transported to another dimension for some nefarious reason, and now Arrow Girl has run across a cross-dimensional incursion from Primal Earth! Arrow Girl defeats the Arachnos boss and breaks their dimension-hopping hardware. Having discovered what happened to the missing people, rescued one, and stopped the Arachnos incursion, it's mission accomplished when she reports to Chimera, and the end of the arc. -- This arc really felt perfect for a level 19 Praetorian. I liked the way the investigations were set up, it really felt like we were doing detective work. There were a lot of chained objectives but they were on indoor maps and each objective seemed to lead deeper into the map, so there wasn't a ton of backtracking. Good use of Praetorian and Arachnos factions, none of them felt overpowered for my lowbie blaster. I liked the Praetorian lore and the obvious infighting between the various Praetorian factions. Chimera was kind of characterized as being a mean boss, but this is fully in character for a Praetor who regularly murders his subordinates when they get uppity. I would've liked an architect souvenir from this arc - it didn't look like it awarded one. I gave this arc 5 stars. Arrow Girl hit level 20 while playing through this arc, triggering Marchand to phone to tell her to go through the portal to Primal Earth - a perfect match for the story.

The next arc in my search was tagged both "Ideal for Teams" and "Challenging" and intended for a Task Force-like experience, which didn't seem like a good idea for my solo blaster. So Arrow Girl's next adventure was Dream Paper (arc# 6645) by @Zasani (fka Glazius), a heroic arc where you're sent to stop the Lost from breaking and entering an apartment complex. I also played this arc on the live servers, but that was a long time ago so I remembered almost none of it. Alfonse Rubel, a delivery boy from Steel Canyon, tells me about a gang of Lost breaking into his apartment building. Entering the apartment complex, I rescue a number of tenants, including Grandma Yan. Explosive arrows are not "best practices" for hostage situations, but it worked out Curiously, the Lost seemed mainly interested in stealing packets of medicine from Grandma Yan. Alfonse sent the "medicine" off to a PPD lab, and the analysis came back with a lead to a warehouse full of Tsoo. The Tsoo were remarkably Zen about Arrow Girl breaking into their warehouse and demanding answers; it turns out the "medicine" wasn't anything illegal, just some herbal alternative medicine one of them had made for Granny Yan. Going back to Alfonse, he tells me the PPD lab he sent the paper packets to was under attack! Arrow Girl just cleared out another attack on the PPD in the last arc. Why do villains keep attacking the poor police department?! *shakes fist at sky* In the police lab, Arrow Girl rescued a number of rather woozy and confused police and Longbow saying that they had gotten "exposed" to some substance. Finally she tracked down a lab tech who actually knew what was going on. It turns out it's the paper used to wrap the packets of medicine, not the contents at all! There was something psychoactive about the paper that mesmerized all the police people who looked at it, and this had something to do with why the Lost wanted it so badly. The "dream paper" was getting regularly dropped off by a Troll paperboy, so Arrow Girl went off to track this Troll down. I eventually find him deep in a Troll cave. He looks a bit sick, and his friends are not happy that I'm there. Once I fight off the other Trolls, the paperboy tells me he's trying to get clean from Superadine (which is why he seems sick). He's trying to go legit and was delivering the paper as a favor for a Mr. Blaloch, but he willingly tells me where he's picking up the dream paper - another warehouse, of course. In the warehouse is a ton of paper-making paraphernalia which all needs to be destroyed, over the protests of the Lost that are operating the paper mill. I run across the Troll paperboy again and he offers to help out; having a big muscly ally proves very useful for Arrow Girl. The Lost keep babbling something about Scripture and the Prophet, and we finally stumble across the Prophet himself: The Prophet / Mr. Blaloch seems a little mixed up, alternating between villain dialog and being a confused old man, the two personalities struggling for control. Exposure to the dream paper and/or the Lost had given the Prophet psychic powers, but he's not too tough, and Arrow Girl and her troll sidekick manage to beat him. Afterwards, Mr. Blaloch recovers from being possessed by the dream paper and seems to have no memory of what happened - though there are several loose ends that hint at future investigations. (Though I don't believe a sequel was ever published.) Overall I thought this arc had an offbeat plot but was well written and well balanced for a low level arc; mostly standard enemies with a few custom characters for bosses and hostages. I liked the minor characters that were introduced: Grandma Yan, her Tsoo grandson, and the Troll paperboy. I would've liked Blaloch to get a little more development before we meet him in the last mission, that would've made his possession (and eventual recovery) hit harder. Alfonse does name drop Blaloch earlier on, but it wasn't enough to give me any kind of impression of the man. The clues were well-written, especially the ones that told a personal story about one of the characters. The idea of the dream paper itself was very creative, and it made total sense that we'd check into the drugs before suspecting something about the paper. I gave this arc 5 stars. Arrow Girl finished the arc 70% of the way through level 19.