Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning

[Kanye Qwest]

@ixokai
People are talking about the cons of having a pose order/turn order widget coded in the game. No one's saying you are advocating those things.

[Auspice]

@ixokai said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Who the hell is talking about punishing anyone (let alone everyone) or slavish dedication to a pose order?

I think asking that everyone keep a pose order, even in a larger scene, because someone 'might' jump order is considered punishing everyone else. It's going 'I'm going to limit all of you because of something one person may or may not do.'

I've also seen people pitch fits when someone poses 'out of order' because the proper order was someone who went AFK for a long period of time without warning. I consider that punishing also because, depending on the person having a fit, it can be problematic.

[lordbelh]

I like stepping out of my pose order occasionally. Slip in a quickie. That sort of thing. Give a better flow to the scene. .

[Thenomain]

@lordbelh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I like stepping out of my pose order occasionally. Slip in a quickie. That sort of thing. Give a better flow to the scene. .

And if a scene is big enough, it will organically fracture. The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

[Roz]

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@lordbelh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I like stepping out of my pose order occasionally. Slip in a quickie. That sort of thing. Give a better flow to the scene. .

And if a scene is big enough, it will organically fracture. The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

I think we all know in our hearts what each of us did to deserve them.

[Arkandel]

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

HM. Regular mandatory Mass scenes. 25+ characters in a room.

I still have nightmares.

[Cupcake]

Arx, I love you, but goddamn do I feel like an idiot half the time trying to understand all the systems and purposes for things. I'm outright terrified folks are going to lose patience with me and my code follies.

[Kanye Qwest]

I promise you that as long as you aren't getting mad at us, we won't get mad at you! Be as slow and reluctant about the coded systems as you like, our playerbase is very helpful and friendly, and Apostate literally doesn't burn out (I am less helpful as I also ignore the coded systems and thus can't answer questions very well). But as long as you have a positive attitude, we are down for it. We'll find an answer!

[Ganymede]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

It's mostly the latter that bugs me the most, as it kills any narrative immersion and also makes it take like twenty minutes for people to pose.

People need to learn how to pose-queue. It's fucking simple and easy. That people don't do this bugs the shit out of me.

---

@ixokai said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

And yet, people constantly ask, 'is it my turn'? or 'who are we waiting on?'

People need to learn how to employ scroll-back, or how to pay better attention to whatever the fuck it is they are doing. Don't give me this multi-tasking bullshit.

---

@Auspice said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I've also seen people pitch fits when someone poses 'out of order' because the proper order was someone who went AFK for a long period of time without warning.

People need to learn how to stop being such babies. Adapt or die, fucks.

---

Seriously, every time this conversation comes up, my eyes roll so hard that sparks fly out of my ears.

[Kanye Qwest]

People need to learn a lot of things. Not sure how that's relevant to the actual world we inhabit, though.

[deadculture]

Since someone prodded me so I do a charity work here, this is your community alert:

Custodius plays at Arx.

Here's his char.
http://play.arxmush.org/character/sheet/1983/

Caveat emptor.
You're welcome.

[Tinuviel]

@deadculture That... explains so much.

[Cupcake]

Well, shit. Figures.

[Catsmeow]

So here's a stupid question: Why do we care who Custodius plays?

Should this be a concern?

[Tinuviel]

@Catsmeow Think of the worst player you've ever seen. Think of someone worse than that.

Custodius is the guy those guys look up to as an example of a perfect player. For actual details, just search for Custodius on the forum, you'll find plenty to justify the caution/suspicion/hatred etcetera.

[WTFE]

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

1. I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.
2. If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

[WTFE]

@Catsmeow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

So here's a stupid question: Why do we care who Custodius plays?

Should this be a concern?

I'm probably the person who played with Custodius the first here on the board since, AFAIK, Castle Marrach was his first online text game. So let me tell you about his tenure on CM. Then let me point out that he has not visibly improved in any aspect beyond manipulation since.

In Castle Marrach, a MUD-like game similar to Arx in feel (although far lamer in theme), the character that Custodius' player is most known for is the character with the rather twee name "Morte". Of course this character was dark and mysterious and wore nothing but black and so on and so forth. (Interesting side note: he snidely kept insisting that "Morte" should be pronounced "Mort-ay" -- "like the French do". Actual francophones told him he was full of shit, but hey, Custodius isn't the kind of guy who lets facts interfere with his rich fantasy world.)

Now CM at the time was billed as a game of intrigue. And Morte played that game really well by all visible signs. He had a gang of thugs who'd go around beating (or worse) anybody who crossed him, and they were terribly good at their jobs, seeing as, you know, not a single one of them ever got caught. Ever. Even when the entire castle was up in arms and looking for even a single one of them. Long after I quit the game I found out how Morte managed to pull this off. He introduced "blue-booking" to the game. All those thug attacks? They were just him manipulating drama hounds into saying they'd been attacked by thugs in "blue-booked" scenes. None of it ever actually happened in-game using in-game mechanics. Why were no thugs ever caught? Because they never fucking existed. It was win-win for the pairing of Morte/Custodius and the drama whore of the week. The drama whore got attention for the brutal beating and wounding and worse, and Morte/Custodius got this mysterious air of untouchability.

Now, naturally, given the Big Baddie nature he built up around himself, there was work done IC to take him down. And there was one guy (name long since forgotten, so I'll call him Pulpit) who was almost obsessive about getting Morte. He would loudly denounce Morte for his crimes, would plot and scheme to take Morte down, and would get involved with everybody else who was anti-Morte to help them in their own schemes, reasoning that if everybody worked to take Morte down together, Morte would fall. (Morte would eventually fall. I'll get to how later.)

All these plans came to naught, however. Somehow Morte had informants who would tip him off to any plans against him. (Even the good ones.) He was never where he was supposed to be; never near the pincers. Other people took the fall for him and he just skipped away, untouchable. Of course when you find out later that Pulpit was one of his alts…

Morte/Custodius was made staff (a "StoryPlotter") at Castle Marrach for "driving RP". Then he got really bad. With his staff powers he would just emote escaping through a secret door that wasn't there in the game. He was able to make perfect disguises that couldn't be seen through (the game mechanisms actually permitted disguises and let you see through those if you had the right powers/spells/abilities/items). He could make his mysterious thugs with impunity, then have them mysteriously die whenever they were caught. His antics got things to the point that as soon as any hint of Morte was in a plot, all the experienced players who weren't in the in-crowd of staff and staff-friends just walked away.

Now, keep in mind that Morte was elevated to staff because he "generated RP". Let me, as a sideline, give you a Morte "plot" in a nutshell. For a long time there was nothing happening for most players at CM. The staff was an inbred circle jerk and paying customers were getting fed up with this. Revolution was brewing. So Morte leaped in to throw the paying rabble a bone just to help stop the upcoming mass exodus. (Foreshadowing: it didn't work.) He inhabited the body of the palace chef and came out to the "Outer Bailey" (code for "place where those not in the in-crowd were forced to play with nothing ever really happening") to treat all the peasants to his special stew. It was sickening to watch everybody and their dog log in their characters just so they had a chance to actually interact with someone (an NPC even!) from the "Inner Bailey". And then the "plot" started. A rat stole the chef's prized ladle. (Yes. Ladle. You read that correctly. The plot was about a stolen ladle. Stolen by a rat.) Morte-played-chef goes ballistic and orders all food cut off to the Outer Bailey entirely because of his precious ladle being stolen. Until his ladle was returned to him, nobody would be eating anything. Everybody scatters trying to find the rat and the ladle. Many hours of "RP" ensued that consisted almost entirely of "have you seen a rat?" "no, have you?" "yes, but no ladle" repeated ad nauseum. Finally someone who was a staff-friend well on her way to joining the Inner Bailey crowd mysteriously finds the ladle in a room that had been searched by at least a dozen people before already. Crisis is averted. Ladle is returned. Food supplies are restarted.

Then the biggest "fuck you" of the story: The "grateful" chef "rewards" the person who found the ladle … with his fucking stew. You know, the stew that at the start was going to be for everybody? Yeah, that's now the reward for one person.

Fucking. Stew.

Every fucking Morte-run plot was like that: something offered to many, then taken away, then offered to a staff-friend who "solved" the problem. (Most CM plots sucked if you weren't in the in-crowd, but Morte's were the lamest and most aggravating by far.)

So I said that Morte finally fell. Here's how. He seduced the wife of one of the game's owners/principals into meeting him in a motel room and fucking. They got caught. He was banned from the servers and a lame duel was fought that killed his character bit. That was it. (How do I know? Interesting story: when I was trying to figure out why a bunch of characters had vanished without a trace, I said, in a private OOC conversation with another character, "WTF HAPPENED!? DID HE FUCK THE BOSS' WIFE OR SOMETHING!?" Within 30 seconds I was yanked into the staff room of discipline and grilled for who told me about this because apparently there was a huge wall of secrecy complete with signed legal documents around it. My frustrated, off-the-cuff ludicrously over-the-top comment turned out to be true. They got really upset when, upon being asked who told me, I said, "You did. Just now." Then they tried to claim that I had a legal obligation to not spread the story. Which I just laughed at because at that point I hated the fuckers more than they hated me.)

So, that's your "Custodius". You tell me: is this a source of concern? I've been watching his performance on many places since his CM days. I've even interacted with him via IM services and on some social MU*es since then. He's claimed many times that "I was only 17" and "I've improved" and so on … and then stories come out of the MU*es he plays on that shows he's the same old Morte I knew and despised back in the CM days. He is truly the metaphorical leopard whose spots never change.

If Custodius is on your game, get him the fuck off your game. If you're in a game with Custodius on it, get off the game. People here have a hate hard-on for VASpider. I think Custodius is at least at the same level as her for sheer toxicity. If you don't listen to my advice in this paragraph, let me know so I can get the popcorn started.

[Sunny]

How long ago was the CM stuff?

Also, a grown married woman slept with a minor, and it's the minor's fault? I have a 17 year old. He is a child.

[Tinuviel]

I don't even care about the accuracy of that story. I just really enjoyed reading it.

[Tehom]

@WTFE said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

1. I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.
2. If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

I am honestly confused how anyone could ever imagine that an email would be anything more than a convenience for automating the application process so that a GM doesn't have to be on hand. I'd be happy to waive it if someone is unwilling to provide an email, though I'd wonder why they wouldn't just google 'temp email' and save both of us time.