Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems

[Kanye Qwest]

So thanks for the idea of this thread, but we get goodfeedback talking to players directly and aren't really getting the kind of suggestions we'd hope for. If you have feedback, take it through the official channels in game or on github, we are abandoning this MSB-staff-interfacing to focus on what we think is important, and fun.

Back to your regularly scheduled posting.

[Tempest]

@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

So thanks for the idea of this thread, but we get goodfeedback talking to players directly and aren't really getting the kind of suggestions we'd hope for. If you have feedback, take it through the official channels in game or on github, we are abandoning this MSB-staff-interfacing to focus on what we think is important, and fun.

Back to your regularly scheduled posting.

And then you only get feedback from the players you like and actually talk to, and they're generally not going to be honest about things, because either the current state benefits them, or they're afraid to be honest with you and lose their staff buddy.

But, as you will.

[Sunny]

Events are hard to run to begin with. Making it much more complicated than, say, the modeling code is right now (which is at a really sweet spot, imnsho, in terms of actual ease of use, I love it) would end up discouraging me, I won't try and speak for other people. Adding too much more to what's already there in terms of system-I-have-to-put-input-into is asking a lot, and I suspect it would end up meaning people engaged with it less, rather than resulting in them engaging in it more.

[Thenomain]

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

And then you only get feedback from the players you like and actually talk to, and they're generally not going to be honest about things

If they're bad players, you have a pretty valid point, but considering that Arx has about 100 players on at any given time, I doubt they're that worried about the echo chamber.

Unless they criticize and ban players with negative feedback.

Depending on how they present it, sure, sometimes people deserve to get banned or sneered at online and publicly, but if everyone trusts staff to behave civil as their first interaction with everyone, then they won't have a problem.

Mind you, I was recently told the KQ was not officially staff anymore, but I'm sure I'm getting outdated information.

[Tempest]

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

And then you only get feedback from the players you like and actually talk to, and they're generally not going to be honest about things

If they're bad players, you have a pretty valid point, but considering that Arx has about 100 players on at any given time, I doubt they're that worried about the echo chamber.

Unless they criticize and ban players with negative feedback.

Depending on how they present it, sure, sometimes people deserve to get banned or sneered at online and publicly, but if everyone trusts staff to behave civil as their first interaction with everyone, then they won't have a problem.

Mind you, I was recently told the KQ was not officially staff anymore, but I'm sure I'm getting outdated information.

That's assuming all voices are equal, or that half are even heard.

I'm sure the people who talk to Apos/KQ/etc daily via pages or on discord, or what have you, have way more input than the average player.

[Thenomain]

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

That's assuming all voices are equal, or that half are even heard.

I'm sure the people who talk to Apos/KQ/etc daily via pages or on discord, or what have you, have way more input than the average player.

This is true of every game ever made and is not unique to Arx. People with the ear of staff, "staff-friends", tend to have a higher priority than others.

All you can do is either trust staff to be fair enough to try, or out their nepotism or hypocrisy on some kind of web site set up for it.

Maybe one that you're posting to right now.

(edit: but not this thread, which is about constructive criticism on Arx's systems.)

[Tempest]

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

That's assuming all voices are equal, or that half are even heard.

I'm sure the people who talk to Apos/KQ/etc daily via pages or on discord, or what have you, have way more input than the average player.

This is true of every game ever made and is not unique to Arx. People with the ear of staff, "staff-friends", tend to have a higher priority than others.

All you can do is either trust staff to be fair enough to try, or out their nepotism or hypocrisy on some kind of web site set up for it.

Maybe one that you're posting to right now.

(edit: but not this thread, which is about constructive criticism on Arx's systems.)

Creating an echo chamber seems like a bad idea.

That's constructive criticism.

[Groth]

The way things right now, the 3/3 haggler and 3/3 socialite is about 1/10th as effective as the 5/5 however the socialite has the additional aspect that they continue to scale linearly with how many 5's they have in the 'primary' social skills. Someone with four 5's is about twice as good as someone with two etc.

That's just a consequence of how roll and keep works. The result of a given roll is roughly linear with the stats/skills used, once you have enough dice to consistently beat the difficulty, all additional bonuses just add linearly to your result.

For the 'base' difficulty of 15, that's about 3 dice. Haggling uses 20 which is about 4 dice and modeling uses diff 30 which is about 6 dice worth. That leaves a hypothetical 3/3 character with only 3, 2 and 0 dice remaining respectively for getting the result compared to the 5/5 who has 7/6/4

If you want to achieve something like what @brent suggests, the difficulty needs to be kept relatively low (like 10-15) in order to allow a 3/3 to actually beat it with some threshold. Then you can squeeze the high end by running the result through something like the power of 0.9. At that point 5/5 would still get about 2x the result of 3/3.

[Thenomain]

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Creating an echo chamber seems like a bad idea.

That's constructive criticism.

Agreed, but here's what's going against the Echo Chamber theory:

• 100+ Players
• Feedback from people who are engaging the system

Here's what's going for it:

• People who don't like Arx aren't playing it
• Once the feedback is given, there's no discourse
• (edit, someone reminded me) Arx is kind of ban-happy against nay-sayers

I have my own reasons to not trust Arx staff; they are varied and well-documented and I won't repeat them here.

That Arx staff believed that this thread was for them was their first mistake; the person starting this thread is not an Arx staffer, and so their farewell from this thread was entirely for themselves. Nothing wrong with this, though it was a bit of a polite middle-finger to the existence of this thread.

I'm honestly not surprised nor phased by it.

This thread is for us, Soapbox posters, to play around with the ideas of systems of a game. That's it. As I said before, anyone who thinks anything more or less of this thread is probably fooling themselves.

We're all fools from time to time.

If any one person takes this conversation and makes a system with this as feedback, then this thread is a win. Arx doesn't do things perfectly. Nobody does. But we can take what Group A does and apply them to Group B. We can talk and discuss and invent and that's pretty goddamn amazing.

If Arx staff was getting too emotional about it, then it's for the best for everyone that they've taken their ball and gone home.

So...how about that prestige, eh?

[Groth]

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Agreed, but here's what's going against the Echo Chamber theory:

• 100+ Players
• Feedback from people who are engaging the system

Unless there is a secret channel I don't know about, there's very little talk about Arx on Arx outside of the odd panic on the info channel whenever a major change is made. As far as I'm aware, MSB is the official Arx forum and the main place Arx players talk about Arx.

[Thenomain]

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Agreed, but here's what's going against the Echo Chamber theory:

• 100+ Players
• Feedback from people who are engaging the system

Unless there is a secret channel I don't know about, there's very little talk about Arx on Arx outside of the odd panic on the info channel whenever a major change is made.

Asked and answered:

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Here's what's going for it:

• Once the feedback is given, there's no discourse

You throw feedback at the "proper channels", which is often code by bad staff for saying "throw it in this pit and we may look at it".

Arx is proud of its "our way or the highway" methodology and fortunately that works for a lot of people. I think the only truly successful games would have a Benevolent Dictator approach. The question that you and Tempest raise is: Are the dictators benevolent?

Or at least are they benevolent enough?

If not, then I agree with Tempest's echo-chamber concern. If they are, then there's not much to worry about.

[Meg]

@thenomain yeah, running a game with true democracy would suuuuck man. Also, talk about meangirling.

[Sparks]

Honestly, the issue is that we kind of tried, as an experiment, to engage with the thread as a primary source of system design feedback when—as @Thenomain says—it was more a theorycrafting thread and not meant for Arx staff. (This one's largely on me, since I'm the one who really decided to try to engage with folks in hopes of getting concrete feedback before redoing the system.)

However, a lot of this thread has not been actionable suggestions, which... well, after all, it's more a theorycrafting and analysis thread, rather than something focused solely on how to improve things to make stuff more fun for players, which is the focus I needed in my redesign work.

(This isn't to say there haven't been some good suggestions in the thread—definitely ones that we'll be taking into account for prestige/modeling/etc. reworking—but it's not the focused type of feedback that I was looking for.)

Further, it's kind of occurred to staff that "let's pull suggestions from threads on a random forum out there on the internet" isn't really the best path, since that excludes anyone on the game who doesn't have an account here from weighing in on the conversation. Whereas there's a system discussions board on the game itself where everyone on game can, well, discuss systems, which makes a lot more sense to use.

(Plus, beyond the system discussion board on game, I certainly try to always be accessible via page when online, as does Apostate. We may not always be unidle—especially me, if I'm working on code, since I can get Very Deeply Engrossed in my PyCharm window—but I usually try to keep an eye on the staff window when online. So there are avenues to offer suggestions that aren't just 'Discord one of the staffers' or something similar.)

This isn't to say that people can't distill ideas from this thread and post 'em to the system design board on game as suggestions—in fact, that would be awesome, so that really good feedback doesn't get missed—just that we really shouldn't be acting like this thread is a good 'main feeder source' of suggestions on system design, when—again, as Thenomain said—the thread isn't really meant for us.

Staff more formally bowing out is meant more because we kind of had been engaging to a degree that some folks kind of had gotten the idea that this thread was the primary avenue of feedback on system design... which it really shouldn't be.

[mietze]

@kanye-qwest why assume that only social characters run events for their houses. Lots of "combat" pcs do because their players like doing that or because no one else will step up.

[Thenomain]

And @sparks is what "elegant" looks like.

Staffers and wannabe-staffers, take notes.

[saosmash]

I like to run events, but also it is exhausting and I hate it. Whether I am running events depends entirely on which part of this preference is dominant at any given time. Prestige rewards aren't really germaine to that, I don't think. I'm not sure what the solution is, though. Perhaps if there were a RL chocolate and/or alcohol delivery system involved with event-hosting.

[Groth]

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

You throw feedback at the "proper channels", which is often code by bad staff for saying "throw it in this pit and we may look at it".

Arx is proud of its "our way or the highway" methodology and fortunately that works for a lot of people. I think the only truly successful games would have a Benevolent Dictator approach. The question that you and Tempest raise is: Are the dictators benevolent?

Or at least are they benevolent enough?

If not, then I agree with Tempest's echo-chamber concern. If they are, then there's not much to worry about.

I think any succesful design requires a single strong vision for what the end result should be like. You can insert all sorts of proverbs about captains and cooks here. However when you're sitting up there and designing things in line of your vision, it's really easy to lose touch with how it actually feels like in play and it's only through good feedback you can ensure you'll end up where you wanted to go.

It's hard to get good feedback though, most players never want to give any opinions at all while others just want to rant and rave about what they want while the designer usually just wants to know if things feel like they're intended to feel.

[mietze]

I would say that events are largely for social /players/. I love people. I have lots of crazy/fun/stupid/near ideas for events. I like to rp with family and groups. I-player like that. So out of all the folks in one of my families I am the most likely to drag people with me to events, the most likely to organize a small get together, the most likely to proactively drop lines to others to invite them to rp about totally unrelated to stats/prestige/systems stuff...even though I am the least socially statted person of that family. Because I like doing those things.

[mietze]

Personally I think a small bump in xp for the individual running something is enough. That is equally rewarding to everyone. Social pcs snd knowledge PCs and combat pcs can then use that to whatever purpose they want (maybe for their specialty. Maybe not and they just go for another dot in x party-related skill that they wouldn't have felt right about getting otherwise (OH NO THEY ARENT MIN/MAXING!!!!!!!). Or whatever they want.

[Thenomain]

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

It's hard to get good feedback though, most players never want to give any opinions at all while others just want to rant and rave about what they want while the designer usually just wants to know if things feel like they're intended to feel.

There are a lot of documents out there aimed toward board game designers on how to get feedback. This is a well-trodden path. It starts with wanting to be open to feedback.

If people on Arx don't feel comfortable giving feedback or having a discussion, then that's an internal issue that should be addressed, starting with the important one: Sometimes the feedback you get won't be pretty.

"Kill your darlings."

More specific questions would be a good start, too. Explaining the scope of the feedback being requested. Taking even the Firehose style responses to better get the feedback intended. Communication as a cycle is a craft.

That's my "I agree", but hopefully adding to it.