Kyksie

I ran through this myself, it was pretty good. Lot of high quality writing, a plausible story, no time wasters. Only nitpick is a few little spelling errors.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cimerora Arc# 43268 Answering Imperious' call for aid, you and a group of intrepid heroes traveled back in time to Cimerora, determined to thwart Romulus and the Fifth Column's plans for temporal domination. Except, the cheap secondhand time shunt you bought at Crazy Mark's House of Bargains malfunctioned, dropping you off two weeks after the invasion... into the middle of a slave pit. And, for some reason, your powers aren't working. The last three days have consisted mainly of shoveling horse manure. This won honorable mention or something in a contest a few years back.

The Trilogy of Moderate Evil I wrote these on the Live server way back in '09 or so. The player is a villain who has worked their way to near the top of the Rogue Isles food chain and is now doing odd jobs for Recluse and his merry gang. Two Chicks at Once #53229 Working for Lord Recluse, you discover Longbow has launched a cunning and titillating plot to undermine the Rogue Isles. With your help, Arachnos will strike back in kind. Contains a custom group who should be only mildly challenging. Contains two archvillains, but you'll have AV allies. The ending souvenir refers to some of my friends from the Live server. Curiouser and Curiouser #53230 How can Lord Recluse's latest plot be so secret even he doesn't know about it? How do Longbow and Malta fit in, and who invited Nemesis? In missions 1, 2, and 4, an AV/EB will spawn after completing some objectives. They are not required, but give an extra clue. Has some naughty subject matter, but nothing worse than you might find on late night cable. The arc's Dark Secret is revealed in the mission souvenir. If you've played a lot of arcs, make sure you have less than 75 souvenirs or you won't receive any more. Cat: It's What's For Dinner #53231 Such a simple plan... steal the Orestes Rifle, kidnap Ms. Liberty, defeat Statesman. What could possibly go wrong? This is a parody of the LRSF. The last mission has an Easter Egg. I won't explain it. You either get it or you don't. In the first mission, you do NOT need to fight the Titan. The entrance is near it. The final mission has a choice of two possible endings! One requires you to beat a tough AV/EB, the other does not. A level of at least 40 is recommended, 50 being ideal. Contain a bit of mildly risque subject matter. Breaks the 'Ocelot Rule' in many places. No defeat alls, feel free to stealth past trash mobs to the objectives. All archvillains will scale down to EBs, bosses down to lts.

I'm mostly looking at the second mission, which is located on a huge outdoor map. To complete it you have to defeat a particular spawn, but there's no way to know which it is, so you have to plow through and mop up every group until you hit the right one. Don't do this. The third map is a defeat all, but it's tolerable because the map isn't huge.

I also ran through two other arcs by the same author: Earth Defense Sentai :: World Wide Pollution The player is tasked with stopping Crey's pollution, which for some reason has spawned the "Toxic Fairy". There writing is a bit sparse but there are almost no spelling errors. Cheap Chinese Productions :: City of Ninja A local herbalist has a thousand year old ginseng root, which will cause a ninja lord to get super powers if he eats it, go stop him please? It's a bit of a stereotype, but then the title of the arc suggests it might be a self aware parody of Asian stereotypes. I dunno. Anyway, this is another arc with OK writing and only a few spelling errors ("gensing"). The problem is the time wasters, of which there are several.

Good lord. I post a three paragraph review and people have written a novel in response Yes, I banged out the review in five minutes, because I know that only a dozen people would read it. That's also why I don't make AEs anymore. It's disheartening to spend twenty hours on something and have two people play it. Yes, the spelling errors are everywhere. If you have to ask, then you didn't play it for even a minute.

I've mostly given up reviewing stuff, but I saw this sitting with no replies and couldn't resist. The player is greeted by Van Helsing, who tells the player that vampires have invaded Paragon, check it out pretty please? The player journeys to various locales and battles vampires, who are a custom group with varied powers, and are for some reason obsessed with Maemae van Whooters, a minor character form the Television arc. On the plus side, there actually is a plot and it actually makes sense, the custom mobs are well done and not too hard, and there are no time wasters. On the downside, the writing isn't great, it's lacking in details (i.e. blank interact bars) and there are a gazillion spelling errors. EDIT: also, one mission has several EBs who are set to flee, making them almost impossible to defeat, which I found kinda annoying.

Burroughs' John Carter series was pulp adventure. It was better than the average pulp story, but objectively it wasn't great.

I vaguely remember on the Live server someone did an arc based on Burroughs' work, as that you?

Yep, for the most part I've given up reviewing arcs. Back on Live, there were 392 new arcs every week, so people needed some sort of guide as to which were worth their time and which sucked. Here we get 2-3 arcs a month, and almost all are consistently good. As for The Rathian Returns, the player (reduced to level 34 for some reason) is talking with a contact named "Bunbree", who tells us how "the Rathian" fell, so we go to Croatoa to watch, or maybe we're traveling back in time or something. We beat off loads of Tuatha to rescue the guy and then get hit with an EB ambush. Then to Neutropolis to click eight glowies and fight another EB, then a warehouse where we fight Arachnos, click nine glowies, then fight a Skull EB who spawns near the entrance and runs when low on health, mission failed. Finally we go to Atlas, where we smash three "death cauldrons" and fight an eb who is invisible until you are on top of him. The arc is clearly a love letter to the author's chars, but I can forgive that because it doesn't remind us how awesome they are every thirty seconds. I can almost forgive excessive glowies, tough EBs without warning the player, and a boss that requires ten minutes searching. What I can't forgive is the million billion spelling errors. If you're making pancakes for someone, first make sure that the skillet is clean and the pancake mix didn't expire during the Bush administration. If you're going to give someone a ride to work, clean your kids' vomit off the back seat first, maybe spray a little Febreze or something. And if you're making an AE arc, especially a story focused one, give it at least one pass through a spell checker first.

This doesn't have quite as many spelling errors as some arcs I've played. And, the Mary Sue isn't quite as blatant.

You could possibly do a series of short arcs. Each one ends with "To make choice A, play arc 99832. For choice B, play 99833." Still, given that 99% of people play only to farm, an extra layer of complexity would mean even less people running it.

Sharing a box of Drenched Donuts with Synapse and Mynx, Kyksie's Crime Scanner buzzes. Exhaling, she passes the joint to Mynx and thumbs the screen. "Who's this BOSS_NAME?" Synapse burps. "I think I've heard of him. He pops up seemingly at random here and there." "And..." she squints at the screen, "he's the leader of 'Villaingroup'? That sounds ominous." Mynx pulled up her shorts and hopped over the platform. "And generic." "Generic and ominous." "Better check it out." Dusting herself off, Kyksie takes one last toke and super-leaps up to the monorail. Five minutes later, she arrives at a nondescript office. Expecting enough villains for eight people, Kyksie spots only a single figure facing her. A code hides his identity, but she can tell that this is really Mender Roebuck, the mysterious merchant from the land outside time, Ouroboros. Kyksie dodges his ineffective swings for a minute, then exits the building, shaking her head. Have the Menders decided to set up a foothold in our space and time? Or in Mender Roebuck acting on his own, maybe to establish a transtemporal Major Flander's franchise? Or is Kyksie completely stoned out of her skull?

Set the boss and the glowie to appear in the same zone. Unfortunately, a lot of the custom maps, like the Leviathan one, were designed only for one particular mission and are not coded with zones. "Himalayas" is spelled wrong, there are a few others. A mob bark is where the mobs shout "Oh no it's $name, run away!" It adds to the atmosphere and is a good way to deliver info without using clues. Not that there's anything wrong with clues, you just shouldn't only use them.

The player is tasked by some dude to go all over the world and get him five pieces of armor that will make him godly or something. Five maps, five glowies, sometimes with a bossfight afterwards. Oh yeah, on one map, the boss spawned on the other side of the map from the triggering glowie. Don't do this. There's nothing horribly wrong with this, but it's very bland and low effort. Sparse writing, a few spelling errors, no custom mobs, no minion barks, disjointed level range. We're never told exactly why the player decides to help, even on the one mission where you literally break into Manticore's mansion and steal from him.

IIRC you can shorten it to $him and $his.

Also, Stable Diffusion has a general idea of City of Heroes.

That was me asking that question!! It was one of the lore AMAs, I asked if killing Statesman was a way of giving Jack Emmert the middle finger, he said "no Emmert is a great guy". (Of course, Miller would have been hurting his career if he answered in the affirmative, so maybe he was sugarcoating. You never know.)

Remember the sitcom "ALF"? It ended with a cliffhanger where ALF was captured by G-men intending to dissect him. He was supposed to have been rescued next season... but the series was cancelled.

I just went and looked up "Johnny's Squeeze", and... ...ewwww.

Basically, the story should not tell you how your character thinks or feels. For example, if the arc starts with Positron telling you to go into the sewers and beat up Dr. Vahzilok, the mission pop-up should not say "You stride into the darkness with grim determination, determined to bring the foul doctor to justice." Maybe your character is rather timid and prefers to skulk than to stride. Maybe your character is a medical researcher who admired Dr. V's work but objects to his lack of ethics. Maybe you're a mercenary who's just in it for the money. Maybe you're a robot. I call it the "ocelot rule" because the people who feel strongly about this are all named Lady Shy'll'a Ravenhair, and all of them are eight-breasted ocelots who spend 14 hours a day in Pocket D, and have a bio telling you how they walk with effortless grace and smell like French perfume. Oh and they're a vampire sorceress too. There are some cases where it's okay to break the ocelot rule. If the description of your arc plainly states something, it's okay to make assumptions about the player. For example, if the above arc starts with "Your intrepid hero boldly joins Positron on a valiant quest to rid the city of evil!!!!", you can assume that anyone playing it is on the side of good. Also, IMHO it's okay to do that in an arc that's for comedy. My "Trilogy of Moderate Evil" constantly tells you what your character thinks and says, to make the jokes work.

Hey everyone, Kyksie here. As most of you noticed I stopped reviewing arcs a year ago, mostly because there are only about three people who make non-farm arcs nowadays and only about a dozen people who play them. And the three who make them invariably make excellent arcs, which is great for players but not so great for reviewers. I mean for @Cranebump, @Ankylosaur and @Darmian I could simply write "It's great" for each and every review, which gets boring. Also @Terroirnoir seems to have not only taken over the review biz, but is actually putting in more effort than I ever did, so it works out. But, good news: I've finally dug up the trilogy of arcs that started it all, back in '09 or so. Written back when people actually played as villains, the award-winning* Trilogy of Moderate Evil casts the player as a Destined One who has reached the top of the Rogue Isles food chain, and is now working directly for Lord Recluse. A level of at least 40 is recommended, 50 being ideal. Contain a bit of mildly risque subject matter. Breaks the 'Ocelot Rule' in many places. No defeat alls, feel free to stealth past trash mobs to the objectives. All archvillains will scale down to EBs, bosses down to lts. Two Chicks at Once #53229 Working for Lord Recluse, you discover Longbow has launched a cunning and titillating plot to undermine the Rogue Isles. With your help, Arachnos will strike back in kind. Contains a custom group who should be only mildly challenging. Contains two archvillains, but you'll have AV allies. The ending souvenir refers to some of my friends from the Live server. Curiouser and Curiouser #53230 How can Lord Recluse's latest plot be so secret even he doesn't know about it? How do Longbow and Malta fit in, and who invited Nemesis? In missions 1, 2, and 4, an AV/EB will spawn after completing some objectives. They are not required, but give an extra clue. Has some naughty subject matter, but nothing worse than you might find on late night cable. The arc's Dark Secret is revealed in the mission souvenir. If you've played a lot of arcs, make sure you have less than 75 souvenirs or you won't recieve any more. Cat: It's What's For Dinner #53231 Such a simple plan... steal the Orestes Rifle, kidnap Ms. Liberty, defeat Statesman. What could possibly go wrong? This is a parody of the LRSF. The last mission has an Easter Egg. I won't explain it. You either get it or you don't. In the first mission, you do NOT need to fight the Titan. The entrance is near it. The final mission has a choice of two possible endings! One requires you to beat a tough AV/EB, the other does not. *In my mind at least.

Another well written arc. The player is a villain, and the Legacy Chain contact goes on about how distasteful it is to hire you, but eh. Anyway Arachnos is sticking their spidery noses into Legacy business, so we need some info. The player busts into a hideout, steal some dyne to smoke and some doobies to sell, then finds a lead. Or was I supposed to sell the Dyne and... hmm. Maybe that's why Purple Lovin' is looking a bit green this morning. Then we bust in an interrogate more Arachnoses, discover the nefarious plan and steal the Macguffin. It ends in a nicely open-ended ending. Overall, this is yet another very well written arc, with lots of details and no overpowered mobs. Mission 4 in particular went fine. As usual, minor nitpicks are the level reduction, and it breaks the Ocelot Rule. In case anyone has been wondering why my review column has been dead for a year, I've pretty much given up on making and reviewing arcs, mostly because there are barely any arcs that aren't farms lately. I made a character on Incelcior a few months ago, and 99% of the chat is "Sitter LF AE plz". Writing story-based arcs for this crowd would be like opening an opera house in Texas.

This one is really funny!! Everyone check this out. My only gripe is the second mission. It would help if it was clearer that the player does not, in fact, have to click 75 glowies. I was about five seconds away from quitting before I found the special glowie.

I think I vaguely remember Ghost in the Machine? Not sure.