Author: admin

Change of Blog

I’m in the process tonight (possibly spilling over to tomorrow) of changing this blog to WordPress from Movable Type. It’s something I’ve done with my other higher-traffic blogs, and it was BoH’s turn to take the plunge.

Thought the front page for this blog (http://www.hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/) will stay the same, the native RSS feed will be changing to https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/wp/feed/. If you subscribe via Feedburner (including the post-by-email option) that will remain the same.

You’ll know when the change takes place when you go to the actual blog page and everything looks waaaaay different.

I’m posting this now so that folks getting the old feed will see it in their reader and not wonder why my blog’s never being updated (aside from my random gaps of updating of late).

Excelsior! 

End of the “Meow” Mix

I’m not quote sure why Rikti Comm Officer AE Farm missions were dubbed “Meow” missions (I was hoping for Cat Girls, to be honest, go fig), but Positron has decided it’s time to put his foot down on Meows and other extreme farming. Hope you already PLed your toons to 20 …

When we created Mission Architect, the goal was to have an outlet for players to craft cool stories, using our assets, that other players could play and participate in. Other players could rate those stories and the best-of-the best would rise to the top.

While we have accomplished some of those goals with the initial launch of Mission Architect, some have found ways to abuse the system we put in place.

Not surprising in the least, of course.

We are not blind to this happening, nor did we not expect it. However, it is time to take action regarding it, so please be aware that we are about to implement a zero-tolerance stance on the extreme abuse we are seeing in the system.

It would have been nice to have heard a bit of this righteous anger before now.

One thing was made clear to me when I interacted with the players on our Anniversary. It was that you guys really don’t like the powerlevelling that is going on with MA. The constant spam of MA PL teams forming, requests for “Meow” missions, 5 star badge cartels, and the inability to find quality content in the Mission Architect listing are all things I heard complaints about over and over while I was logged in on Tuesday.

And that’s a good point. The crowds of farmers make it difficult to find any mishes to play (except for Dev Choice ones), difficult to find folks to play them with — and, at times, difficult to hang out at AE without mapserving. Comments follow.

So here is a list of things that are going to happen:

  • Players that have abused the reward system egregiously may lose benefits they have gained – leading up to and perhaps including losing access to the characters power-leveled in this fashion. Hmmmm. Harsh to punish actions after the fact. “That which is not forbidden is permitted.” Set the rules and limit things going forward, fine. Data mine to figure out who’s abused this? Not so much. (And I don’t say this as someone who has much to lose).
  • Currently, some badges are being modified, and some may be removed from the game entirely. The list of changes being made to the MA badge system is not final yet, but you will be made aware when we have a concrete plan. Expect the ticket badges to require a lot more tickets to win.
  • Players who knowingly use an exploit when creating an arc, run the risk of having access to MA suspended, or worse- depending on the severity of the action, their account banned. That’s fine — if the list of known exploits is given, or at least described in sufficient detail to make it clear what to not do.
  • Players who have a story arc banned for any reason, will have it continue to use up one of their publishing slots. Players will NOT be able to unpublish this slot without Customer Service’s help. This sets up a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. If an individual gets three story arcs banned, they will no longer be able to publish since their slots will all be used up with banned arcs.This lock will not take place on the first level of “complaint banning”, where an arc has received a larger number of complaints. Players will still have a chance to fix the arc. A good punishment here, and easy to implement. And now I know, I guess, that the Report button isn’t just for dirty words or something.
    • If Customer Service looks at an arc and determines it was banned in error, they will mark it as “unbannable”. At that point the arc can not be banned for any reason. The unbannable flag will reset if the player makes any changes to the arc at that point, and the arc can be banned again. Thus avoiding “griefing.”
    • Remember, publishing slots are account wide, so players will not be able to log in another character on their account and use their slots instead.
    • Players are urged to avoid using common farming terms in their story title and/or descriptions. Even if it’s a joke, DO NOT run the risk of having an arc banned and requiring Customer Support to grant you your publishing slot back. But if I want to make a Cat Girl arc, can I include “Meow”? in the title?

So, overall, a decent approach to punishment … but I remain concerned about ex post facto punishment.

Some of you have taken the stance of “how does powerlevelling hurt the game?” and “shouldn’t I be able to play the game the way that I want?” What we want to make clear is in order to keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging, we have to maintain a risk:reward ratio. This is a ratio we’ve spent years attempting to achieve. Mission Architect is not immune to this, and we are taking swift action to see that the problems players are seeing and are being exposed to are remedied.

Fair enough. It should be indicative (reviewing some of the boards on the subject) of what some folks are looking for from the game, but PLing does have impacts both on team availability, team quality, and PvP competition. It also rankles enough non-PLers to make the game overall less attractive. So I don’t mind seeing this come in. I just wish it had been swifter and more vocal earlier since I14’s release.

Some Champions Online notes

From Massively‘s press betas:

Combat: Interesting use of low-level powers to build endurance that high-level powers then eat. Also interesting video-game-like use of holding down a key to build up a power. And blocks against certain types of attacks? Sounds complicated, but fun.

Character Creation: Time-consuming, but in an interesting way (if you’re one of those people who loves character creation). Stats-based, very RPG-like (well, duh). Power set archetypes, but also much more custom combos. Good variety of power sets — and, yes, power armor is finally a set all to itself. The character edit options sound even (if that’s possible) more flexible than CoX, and the ones you choose influence how your character stands and moves. And … facial expressions. And, it sounds like, a ton of costume options.

Sorcery powers video. Swinging travel video.

CO Dev Blog: One thing CO seems to have going for it is a background from the RPG over the last two decades. That will help a lot.

The First Five Levels: A lengthy intro tutorial which ends with a massive power-up to level 5 and your travel power (broad array, with colored effects, and options to start slow and build up or start off with a bang). Leveling can be added powers, or expansions / strengthening of existing ones (beyond basic power boosts from leveling). Map markers so you always know where you are going.

Choosing your Nemesis: This is a cool idea that never made it into CoX, but that Emmert has made part of CO. Spiffy.

Duplicate names: A way to avoid folks having to come up with “Captain Terrific,” “Capt. Terrific,” “Cap. Terrific,” “CaptainTerrific, ” “Captain.Terrific,” “Captain Teriffic,” etc. is worth its weight in gold.

I am considering it highly likely that I will try this out when it comes out.

A Trio of Tail-Biting TFs

Doyce and Kate are back on CoX for the moment, so we arranged to do some Task Force fun on Sunday afternoon … which turned into Sunday evening, Sunday night, and, um, just barely into Monday morning.

Since they’d not had a chance to do any Ouroboros TFs, we chose those.

First up, Twilight Son and “Smoke & Mirrors.” This is a Lvl 25-34 TF, so we rolled out the Hostess Heroes, who are in the 29-31 range. Margie and I spent an hour or two on Saturday getting them up to enhanced snuff. Pretty reasonable time, but I was reminded again why I am just not thrilled by tanking. Ho-Ho does a fine job (Invuln/Axe) at it. but I always felt like I was slogging through mud (and I’m not even a Stone Tank). We polished off the Circle pretty darned quick — it’s a short TF.

Next up, Mender Lazarus and “The 5th Column Overthrow.” At 30-39, half the team was under level, so we swapped out servers (to Champion) and toons. Doyce brought in Pummelcite (tank), Kate ran Noelle (controller), I loaded Torchielle (blaster) and Margie played Amorpha (scrapper). Great balance, lots of everything, and plenty of damage-dealing, right?

*sigh*

First, we were at a level to spawn AVs, and Nosferatu took us for-evah. Even Amorpha and Torchy couldn’t pile on the damage fast enough, esp. with his life energy suckage. Yikes. Finally Doyce lit on our going out and loading up on damage inspirations — which, through the goodness of Wentworths, we could do. That let us take him down pretty quickly thereafer.

That was only a grind, though, compared to the trio of AVs at the end. Which would have been probably okay if we’d pulled the crowds (and AVs) back into the hallways behind the scenes (maximizing AoE, minimizing sniping), but … well, that didn’t happen as we maneuvered around and our “allies” suddenly took off to attack. 

Many, many deaths later (which made me glad we were running 50s except Doyce), we won. Whew.

Okay, break time. By the time we got started again, it was around 8:30 or 9, which was our big mistake. But, we said, let’s wrap this up with Mender Silos and “Trading Places.” Which is pretty straightforward most of the way until the final mission, where you run around the annoyingly broken terrain of Sirens Call, and try to (a) rescue the Vindicators and Freedom Phalanx from (b) either some high-level Arachnos troops (pretty straightforward) or various of Lord Recluse’s super-villains (who were spawning as AVs).

We knew we needed some healing, so I traded out Torchy for Psi-clone (Ill/Emp controller), and Doyce switched to Hyperthermian (his 50 tank).

Aaaand …

… we got our asses handed to us by Black Scorpion and Scirocco. Then again by Ghost Widow. We got smart and started freeing heroes who were “only” being held by Arachnos troops. We tried Ghost Widow again with Infernal working with us, and had our asses once more handed to us (Mag 100 Soul Storm for the Win!).

We continued trying, slowly freeing heroes without going up against AVs, except an inadvertent encounter with Silver Mantis, who we beat with three heroes along with us.

The broken terrain made keeping the heroes tied to us difficult. They invariably wandered off, got stuck, or got put on someone other than one of our team (at one point, Back Alley Brawler was on Noelle’s Jack Frost — who ran off whenever he got hit, with BAB running with him; another time, Minx was on Silver Swan (woo-woo!), and so spent the melee back at ranged weapons range, idle).

With our merry band in hand, we managed to take on Black Scorpion again (win!), and Scirocco (win!). That gave us Synapse, Ms Liberty, Manticore, BAB, and Silver Swan to, again, take on Ghost Widow.

Who, again, handed us our asses courtesy of still more Mag 100 Soul Storms. Yikes!

It was midnight by now, and we collectively agreed that we should call it a night and reconvene some other time — set at a lower difficulty level.

An interesting note from the ParagonWiki page on this TF: 

Bug! Though each Vindicator and Freedom Phalanx character is presented as a Hero, his or her Hit Points and attacks are those of a Pet-class ally, regardless of difficulty. Citadel is the only exception to this rule, and he spawned as an Elite Boss.

If (still) true, that might explain a lot. Because I really didn’t feel like the allies were helping us all that much, or even drawing that much fire.  

 

It was interesting being back in non-duoing-with-Margie group. We tried some initial voice chat via GTalk, but with four of us that wasn’t really practical, and we didn’t have an actual game chat channel set up. That might have made some things easier all around (including the quick stabbings of keys when an ambush was coming in). It might have also helped deal with just basically different tactical play styles and expectations between the two households (“Wait — where is Doyce going?” “Dave, need a heal — oh, never mind” “Why did Kate just fire that off?” “No, Margie, not yet …”). 

On the other hand, I still had fun, even with the lots of dying bits (one advantage of TFs in the O — the “hospital” is never far from the mission door). And practice makes perfect. Good times.

Farming Subsidies

So before the Devs nerf farming …

Tyger-Tyger, 6th Level Scraper, up to 22 in three missions.

Kwai Havok, 7th Level Scrapper, up to 15 in two missions (but Level Pacted with Copper Mountain, so I was doing it for Margie’s sake).

And, honestly, I don’t feel any need to do any other farming with them. The goal was to get past those awkward pre-Travel (and pre-Stamina) days. 

I feel like I can take it from there.

Especially since 90% of the PUGgy sorts are busy … at AE, farming. Making it darned difficult to get up a team, even on Freedom or Virtue.

Wow, that slope is awfully slippery, isn’t it?

GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

Heh heh heh.

No, really.

  1. CoX female toons tend to move a lot more nicely than the clunky male toons (the “huge” toons get a pass for being, well, huge).
  2. I’d rather watch women than men. That’s my cuppa. Since I’m not going to stare at any character more than one I’m running, I’m going to tend to roll up females.
  3. My first 50 was male. And it looked like me. I’ve done my gender-appropriate time, dammit.

Other I14 stuff I missed

Some cool bits only recently brought to my attention (i.e., catching up on back reading).

Black Market / Wentworth’s Consignment House

  • Characters (on active accounts) who have inventories, bids or items for sale in the Black Market or in Wentworth’s Consignment House will no longer have to log into the game within 60 days to avoid item or influence/infamy expiration.
  • In-game Black Market and Wentworth employees will still give their friendly reminder, however if your account is “active”, they won’t take your “stuff”.

Yes! Though, to be honest, it was an excellent way to stay on top of my less-used characters, I am glad that I don’t have to worry about this any more.

Flight: Made adjustments to Hover and Flight powers. The minimum speed for these powers is now higher. This includes Kheldian Flight powers.

Faster Flying = Goodness.

Best new Mission Architect feature

From the City Scoop on surviving AE:

3. If you have trouble with people firing off powers, look for a door marked Studio B (left side of the Data Stream). This room is a “no Powers lounge” for making missions quietly. If people crowding you at the terminals bother you, type: /macro MA architect. This will create a little button on your toolbar and allow you to access the browser/editor from anywhere in the building. Once you earn the Mission Engineer Accolade, you will have this ability anywhere in game, even inside your missions.

First off, the idea of having a “No Powers” zone is brilliant. Can we please port this technology to Wentworth’s / the Black Market? And inside City Hall (Atlas) and whatever the big civic building is in Galaxy? (Presumably it doesn’t detoggle anything, so you don’t get gacked when you step outside the zone.)

Second, being able to access AE interfaces anywhere in the building and, after an Accolade, anywhere in the game, is remarkably convenient. Please let me know when I can access crafting tables the same way persistently, rather than either through a lame temp power or by going to bases or the universities. (Guys, the crafting stuff is an abstraction. Let’s just treat it as even more of same. I don’t have to go someplace special to install Enhancements; it’s annoying enough I have to go someplace special to buy them, but even that’s just a one-step activity.)

Next up: Nerfing Rikti Comm Officers

When the Mission Architect was first announced, folks were immediately worried about farming. And the Devs said, “Worry not, we have ways to keep that from happening.”

Ah … yeah.

So all those constant Broadcasts for “LF farm ae team” and “Lvl 50 boss farm lfm” are just folks being deluded.

I spent a little time at this today, just to see. There’s a sort of weirdness about the farming routine that’s almost fascinating for about 15 minutes, after which you need a shower. 

I took Al, my Fire/Rad Troller, who had just turned 20. I joined up as the lowest person on a farm mission.

Target: a mission full of Rikti Communications Officers. Like, 20-person spawns of them.

It’s perfect. Comm Officers are (since they changed how they were awarding Portal spawns) pretty high XP, but they are, in and of themselves, pretty wimpy. You never see them alone in the wild, let alone in packs.

Bang. Instant farming. In two relatively short missions (the simple looping city map), I dinged Al over five levels.

Two missions. Forty-five minutes tops, more likely thirty. Five levels.

Now tell me about no farming?

I will be very curious to see how the Devs adjust this (and how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there is). The irony is that they just set things up, after a year and a half, so that PvP nerfs don’t affect PvE. How they will have AE nerfs that don’t affect normal mission play will be a real challenge.

 

As a postscript, I can see some value in “farming.” The pre-14 movement power gap is now gone, but pretty much everyone (no matter what the Devs claim is needed) is grinding from 14 to 20, just waiting for Stamina. Except for those folks who get Quick Recovery earlier, but that’s pretty few in number.

So I can see some value in doing farming missions at that level to jump over that hump to being “really” superheroic. I don’t see a lot of point in doing it at higher levels, and I seriously don’t understand people who farm their way up to 50 … so that they can … um … I have no idea. But that’s been the whole PL conundrum to me, too.

One thing I can say for the Farm League, at least at the moment — there’s always something hopping there. That beats a lot of the action sometimes, on some servers.

I15 already? Yeesh!

Along with the Five Year Anniversary today (well, yesterday), and the recent I14, they’re now announcing I15. Crikey!

5th Column Task Force 

  • Villain Strikeforce (Levels 45 – 50): 5 Missions
    • The Villains are hired for what seems like a simple, high-paying job: Steal information from the Hero 1 Time Capsule. Things go awry when the job ends up leading to the return of an enemy from the past. Now the villains have to deal with the mess they’ve made – while trying to make as much profit from it as possible.
  • Hero Taskforce (Levels 45 – 50): 5 Missions
    • The Heroes follow the trail of some stolen information to find that an old foe is returning… in a big way! Forced to deal with an invasion, the Heroes must scramble to find a way to defeat a seemingly unstoppable enemy.

Enough to make me wish we were hanging with a large enough group to do TFs/SFs.

New Costumes – New Issue 15 costumes include the Vines and Ulterior themed costume sets. More details to come!

New Costume Change Emotes* – Just recently introduced in Super Booster II: Magic, Costume Change Emotes represent a brand new feature type that provide fun and colorful transitions between two different costumes for a given character. Players activate them using the costume change interface, selectable from the main Menu.

  • Backflip
  • Salute
  • Howl
  • Evil Laugh
  • Peacebringer Transform (Kheldian’s only)
  • Warshade Transform (Kheldian’s only)
  • Vanguard Sigil

*By default characters only have one costume slot, and must unlock additional costume slots through activities in the game. This can be accomplished by completing costume slot missions at levels 20, 30, and 40; and by using Halloween Event salvage (which can also be bought, sold or traded via the in-game Consignment Houses).

Huh. So are the ones from the booster pack still going to be only available from that, and these are additional emotes?

I do like the idea of fading into a different costume under the cover of an Evil Laugh …

New Character Faces – Over 20 new character faces provide even more options for character customization

Always nice to see more faces.

Mission Architect Updates 

  • Architect toolbox allows players to better and more easily polish their content before sharing it with the public.
  • Missions can now be selected for both “Hall of Fame” and “Dev Choice,” allowing players to attain both badges. “Dev Choice” missions also have selectable reward types.
  • Enhanced searching and navigation options like key phrase tagging and arc difficulty display help players find the content they’re looking for even faster
  • New Server-wide Architect Chat channel
  • Plus several other features and improvements to Mission Architect

Hmmm. Honestly, not quite as robust a set of things as I’d expect for a new issue. A bit of content (a TF/SF). Some costume parts. Enabling costume change technology (already present) for all. Fixes to Mission Architect. Seems a bit lightweight to me — almost feels like leftovers from the I13 / I14 split.

On the other hand, presumably this won’t take too long to beta and roll out.

How you gonna keep ’em up off the farm?

Sunday morning I was up a bit early, so I hopped onto CoX with some Atlas-level characters on Freedom and Virtue (the only two servers worth PUGging on, given populations.

Now, normally, the Atlas Broadcast channel is filled with (a) invitations for sewer missions and (b) inane chatter, often around costume contests past or future. Not Sunday. Wall-to-wall AE mission solicitations. And not just “I wanna run some Mission Architect stuff,” but “LF AE farm mish” and “AE farming team LFM.”

Yes, it was around before, but farming has now Officially, Really, Truly come to CoX — not as an odd manipulation of certain missions and rules, but as an integral part of the game structure.

Now, there are limits as to what you can do farming. Yes, you get XP. But you also “just” get tickets, which are partly usable for more Mission Architect building swag, or for chances for high-level bits. But that seems to be enough to make AE a big, green farming machine.

Hopefully, this is a matter of novelty. Because, while farming is sketchy per se, the worst part of about this farming is that it’s on generally craptastic missions, which can only hurt the CoX brand. And, meantime, it’s seriously cutting into PUG activity … unless it’s a PUG to do some farming.

I strongly suspect something will be done about this by the Devs, if it continues to be a problem. We’ll see.

 

On the other hand, there are some good AE bits. We played “The Butterfly Effect” last evening with a couple of 21s (Leilah and Kazima), and had a fun time. It’s clear that while there are some fun things you can do with actual mission construction, a lot of the fun is with dialog and color text. Which, upon consideration, has been true with a lot of my favorite arcs.

 

Margie’s Old Star, fire/rad controller, has hit (solo) 48. Woot! She finding limitations on being able to solo AVs (her control can’t overcome their recovery for long enough, and she just doesn’t have the sustained DoT to take them down.

But there’s a lot of other goodies she can use to grab for the brass ring. She’s a great soloable character (and the inspiration, power-wise, for my rebuilt Al McGordo).

 

It was “Bring your old account back for some fun” weekend, and it was nice to see Doyce back on with some old names.

Costumes changes!

Margie picked up the Magic Booster Packs for each of us as a late anniversary gift. Aside from some very pretty outfit pieces, one of the coolest things it included is the ability to do a costume change with a resulting special effect: casting a spell, calling down a flash of lightning, a smoky presto-chango, and a Wonder Woman-like spin. It shows up as an option on the costume screen, so any change follows the emote.

These can also be done as a macro, with the /cce command. Notes are here.

There’s also a new “Mystic Fortune” power you get, which lets you do a tarot-like reading that generates a fairly nice set of non-stackable buffs (mostly) on someone for 20 minutes. It’s actually something worth keeping an eye on and using on your team. Inappropriate for non-magic characters — but valuable enough to use anyway.

Mission Architect gameplay

Friday I ran in a MA arc that Margie wrote (still under development, formal release TBA). I found it very interesting the amount of control the MA system provided, and the ability it gives the creative mission writer to create not just new content, but types of stories. (I may be prejudiced, but Margie’s carnie (not Carnie) arc was just plain fun, as well as being interesting.)

After that, we tried another mission picked at semi-random (search for 4 or 5 stars, few grades). This one (I didn’t note the number, but it mentioned “Dragonettes” in the text) featured a custom group, the Geishas, which were nicely constructed — they looked good, provided a challenge, were interesting. The final mission / encounter, though, turned out to be too hard at our level — insufficient control and DoT for our Lvl 21 duo to get either of the bosses down.

That, in turn, inspired me to write up a quick arc (Lvl 37-50, not yet formally released), which Margie was gracious enough to go through with me a couple of times over the weekend, playing one, then another of our Lvl 50 duos. 

There are still some awkward bits to crafting an adventure — how to make the last glowie give you the clue, how to have EvE battles not trigger so early, how to have anything not trigger so early. It’s also way too easy to drown players in text (a weakness of mine in all circumstances).

Plus, if you test the mish pre-published, you don’t get any inspiration drops. That can be a serious disadvantage.

I think I’ve got it decently polished — one more test, and I’ll officially publish it.

Last night I did some PUGging at the Architect with Miss Crackle, my Lvl 40 Electrical Blaster. The first encounter was against … frogs? Horrible, powerful, frog gangs down in the sewers. It was conceptually awesome, and waaaaay overpowered.

After that, the team leader (well, the new team leader) chose a mission attacking a group of women warriors, “Amazons,” on the skinny city map. We plowed through them, not much challenge.

We did the mission again, set to Boss level. And … plowed through them, with a bit more difficulty, a bit more slowly, but for a lot more XP.

Then we … did it again. Which I’d not realized going in (the introductory interface for MA mishes if you are not the team leader is not very helpful), but it was a little different team makeup, so we plowed through it again.

Yes, I found myself farming Amazons. I hang my head.

It was (a) great XP, (b) not at all fun after, oh, about a third of the way into the second mish. If I’d realized that was the plan, I would have dropped before the third mish; once in, though, I wasn’t going to quit the team.

Not that the mish was a piece of cake — nearly everyone died at some point or another, mostly because the tanks kept rounding up bigger and bigger mobs. But half-way through that last mission I realized something that made these guys cannon fodder: no ranged attacks. I could hover over them and just rain death from above and be absolutely safe. Indeed, at one point, there was just me and one of the tanks (the better one) still up. No problemo.

So, yes, it’s possible to create farming missions using the MA.. Not trivial farming missions, to be sure, but still, XP farms. Sort of “The Most Dangerous Catch.” (Do you incur debt in MA mishs?)

It’s also, if you’re not doing that, quite possible to make impossibly difficult missions. Indeed, I think the biggest weakness of most beginning mission authors is overdoing stuff — too many mobs, too many bosses, too high level, too many clickies, too much everything. A more balanced, nuanced approach is something one has to learn.

Oh, last evening? Katherine, at 8, wrote her own mission (also TBA once tested). She was very jazzed.

Thumbs up on Mission Architect. It both provides an opportunity for added creativity in the CoX world, and teaches respect for the professionals who have written decently balanced missions for the “real” game.

Blog of Heroes news

I will likely be tackling converting this blog over from Movable Type to WordPress Real Soon Now. My MT installation is frelled, and while I can use an external client to post from (the ever-popular ecto/Linear), I can’t actually do much from inside the MT control panel, including adding our latest 50s to the sidebar, adding arcs we write to the sidebar, etc. Feh.

I don’t plan on doing anything fancy, and I’ll give people warning beforehand. Biggest challenge will be maintaining the rather elaborate web of internal links (which I feel obliged to do); I can make that work, but it will turn a half-day effort into a full day or more.

Well, if it were easy, everyone would do it, right?

I14, huzzah!

Well, I haven’t been huzzahing, but only because of serious distractions elsewhere in my life (holidays, blog melt-downs, etc.). 

Margie and I did finally hop on last night, and tried out one of arcs she built (which I’ll advertise here when it’s ready for prime time). I have to say that the whole Mission Architect thing is damned cool, and I see a lot of folks potentially doing most of their heroic careers playing in it (which is why the meta-reality around it seem wrong, somehow, though I don’t have any simple answers to that).

So, yes, I’m sure I’ll be designing something myself, Real Soon Now. Next time I have an afternoon free at home, perhaps.

DING!

And Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra hit 50. Woot! We were both a scosh fumble-fingered in battle, but we both got the aftermath of the Big Ding.

Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra — you were just named Heroes of the City! Where are you going now?

“We are going … um … going someplace really cool! And fun! And — cool!”

“It is very pretty here.”

“Yes. Pretty.”

“Quiet. Peaceful.”

“Yes.”

“And … pretty.”

“You said that.”

“And peaceful. And … hey, what say we go find that Statesy mortal again and see if he needs help beating up bad guys. He is awfully cute, in a non-Kitsune kind of way, you know?”

“Best idea you’ve had all day!”