Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning

[Bananerz]

@Pandora I'll message you a private response because I'm irked with a bit of your response.

Stats: It's very easy to gain a lot of XP per week, and there are significant gainers per week. Look at the reports that are posted. We're nearly at the 200xp 40xp a week realm. That's a big problem and from the discussions on channels, it's easy to see that people do become masters of everything because there is nothing throttling them. You're at folks aiming for 6's.

Cost to Actions: The siege showed a huge amount of available cash, players talked in journals/RP and channels that while there was a large force around the city, there really wasn't an experience of a siege. Sure, you had Bringers and their ilk pop up on events from time to time, but Team Enemy experienced a lot of losses with their special NPC's, what did the players experience except off camera forces lost? You should as a player enjoy that challenge has a risk/reward that is equal otherwise just roll a dice and select the winning pose from a list.

Social: Then why have socio/economic classes in a pretendy game if it means nothing? You should have constraints, there should be expectations upheld on appropriate behavior. Otherwise, wipe it out and everyone is the same. I enjoyed playing a steward, it was terrific fun. But the amount of nobility crossing social boundaries showed that the players themselves don't understand it, but then again it is a fantasy and they're desiring to act out their fantasy for entertainment. That's why you don't see anyone make a fuss about it IC but it consistently pops up OOCly, because people are playing a fantasy and don't want to deal with the reality of limitations on a game. Nobles should have stewards, they should have persons that bridge the gaps of society which in turns creates more RP and begins including others outside your normal A to B RP.

Cliques: @Apos does a great job being inclusive, and the game is great at addressing issues around agency which is a huge breath of fresh air. Just because something exists currently doesn't mean that it is okay, and if we have the ability to change it, why not?

Animals: Now that you made me irritated and bitchy, I'll just say that I'm sick of seeing so many animals follow people around like they are a Disney princess in a movie about to sing away their troubles. STAWP. It'd be great if there was a +followers/squelch command so you wouldn't see any followers on anyone in a room or +messenger/denyanimal, because who wants to have a snake or lemur bite them.

*Edited xp! Thanks voice of reason!

[3543thrh67]

@Bananerz Argh. The animals. The majority of them wandering about the city makes me want to have my bit run screaming through the streets about the city being attacked by wild creatures.

[Thenomain]

@icanbeyourmuse

<facebook>"Share" if you remember random emitters for everything from weather to room ambience; "Like" if it made you grit your teeth.</facebook>

[Roz]

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

@Pandora I'll message you a private response because I'm irked with a bit of your response.

Stats: It's very easy to gain a lot of XP per week, and there are significant gainers per week. Look at the reports that are posted. We're nearly at the 200xp a week realm.

That's -- not true at all. There was one week where there were cron issues and XP got duplicated into weird numbers that topped a hundred. The norm is the top weekly earners are in the 30s.

[Bananerz]

@Roz OK, I'm wrong on the 100's. 30's a week plus extras. Still, HIGH.

[Kanye Qwest]

So in the final battles of the siege (IE the storming of Arx) we realized that uh, if you go unconscious it essentially removed any danger because nothing would target you.

That's going to be (might already have been) fixed. That's why no PCs died during it - though a few still came REALLY close. Whoops. You get this one for free, Arx.

[Pandora]

@Bananerz
Stats: 30 XP per week is a lot but it's not game-breaking. Those people chasing 6 are very focused and haven't spread their XP around as much as others. That's their choice. Raising anything else close to that high will have a steep cost, but there are other things to spend XP on, retainers, for example.

Cost To Actions: Just because people aren't dropping dead left and right doesn't mean there aren't costs to actions. You don't know what compromises/promises/heartbreaks any character has gone through to achieve their aims. Dig deeper, player-death isn't the worst thing that can happen.

Social: I'm not going to lie, I'd love to see more class division, as it stands the whole concept of nobility seems like flavor, the ability to let people call themselves pretty princesses. I'm not knocking it, though it's not exactly what I was looking for. Can't please everyone though, and forcing it down people's throat is often more trouble than it's worth.

Cliques: You didn't make an argument against cliques, so my point stands: I don't see the problem with cliques unless someone -in- the clique is breaking some sort of game rule.

Animals: I almost quit the first time someone's snake or cat or gerbil brought me a message. No argument here.

[Thenomain]

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

Cliques

You know, you're pretty open and giving, Pandora, so I'd like to clarify that a true clique often segregates, or at the very least is non-inclusive. I get that you two aren't (or aren't apparently) talking about this kind of clique, but some other kind of grouping that isn't necessarily going to make it hard for others to get involved. I don't think anyone feels there are (negative/denotative) cliques anywhere on or about Arx.

[Pandora]

@Thenomain Cliques can certainly be non-inclusive. I've never subscribed to the idea that I owe RP to everyone, or that I am obligated to RP with anyone out of some sense of fairness and/or equality. I RP for fun, I RP with people I find fun, I RP with groups of people I have fun with. That's a clique, right? A roleplay clique? No one is being harmed.

@Bananerz went off on me in a private message about someone having a negative clique experience on Arx, but I'm not going to go searching the thread for it. I'm sorry if the cool kids don't want to play with you on Arx, find some friends and RP with them instead? There are so many more pressing issues in the mu* community than a group of people not wanting to play with someone for whatever reason. Key word is 'play'. Playing with someone you don't want to play with isn't play, it's work. I don't work for free.

[Thenomain]

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

No one is being harmed

Grumble grumble "denotation" something something something "dark side"...

clique
klēk,klik
noun
a small group of people, with shared interests or other features in common, who spend time together and do not readily allow others to join them.

Mutter mutter "do not readily allow others to join them" grouse grouse grouse "get off my lawn".

[Kanye Qwest]

@Thenomain Get off your own lawn.

[Thenomain]

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

@Thenomain Get off your own lawn.

... What?

[Jaded]

@Kanye-Qwest
That was a staple for the siege stories too. There was no real element of danger because the NPC badguys that were not just minions were so easily killed that the sense of danger was entirely sucked out of the encountersl. The same thing goes for the attitude of the city - there was no sense of a city under siege. It was 'oh look an attack happened here yesterday, well okay, life goes on'. So by the time the siege itself happened it was pretty much a case of...oh just a lot more of them. Okay. Whatevs.

On that note though I will give super kudos to Apos for running multiple scenes in multiple rooms and keeping up with them all, and making them all interesting and fun to do. That had to be hard as hell and he did a fine job.

ETA:
I will note I am not complaining actually about the danger sense of the scenes during siege stories, I just feel they could have been coordinated or conducted better for a sense of overall danger as a city under siege. I do believe though that they were ran with a 7th Sea kind of vibe to them where the characters were meant to be over-the-top big damn heroes, and that made the scenes in and of themselves fun too.

[Apos]

@Jaded The siege stories were almost all PRPs though, and I'm not giving player GMs carte blanche to kill off characters until the GMing systems come in that'll make that more systematic and easier to review. Have to be careful with that, but yeah at the same time can't have players going nuts and handwaving all danger and making it meaningless.

So right now clear non-consent deaths have been extremely rare, only 5 PCs have died in contested ways that I can think of. I imagine the number will increase in the future, though I don't think we need piles o' bodies to have a feeling of risk, just more than what was there. I think 4 people at the siege battles would have died if we were using current code, so be a little careful there.

[Bananerz]

Dismissing someone's negative experience is in itself a shitty thing to do and ultimately that type of thinking is going to roll into other negative problems. Arx is a community environment based on fixing a lot of the old problems of MU*s, and that's exciting to see change. Dismissing people's negative experiences and telling them to go fuck themselves is part of the old way.

Being not open for engagement from new people is in itself an OOC manipulation of the game as you utilize OOC friendship and coercion on a level you might not recognize. Your clique is a very clear way of ensuring padding to your character with the idea that "I don't owe RP to anyone" turning into "I don't know how you'll react, so I don't want the unknown possible outcome". That is loading your dice, and I sure as heck saw a lot of that.

The majority of organizations had significant manipulation on +tasks as well as the sharing of AP. Members discussed this openly on channels on how particular ones are set up to maximize various resources. There was zero RP with support requests being sent, again with the focus that if you didn't help, you weren't doing your part and then pushed aside as you can work out who helped and didn't. The OOC manipulation is significant on Arx, with most here closing an eye to it while they point at others like Max.

In the end, you aren't wanting new players or a community to grow, you're just wanting the same old thing called something different.

[Sparks]

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

I think 4 people at the siege battles would have died if we were using current code, so be a little careful there.

I am now wildly curious who those four were, I admit. (I'm certain one was Tikva, who I saw go unconscious twice.)

[kitteh]

I restarted on the game now after my first kind of failed attempt (discussed elsewhere with the hooker drama), and I've found the experience pretty enjoyable this time around. While it's impossible to say if she's representative or if I just got lucky, my character who I picked fairly sight unseen has turned out to come with major plot hooks. I'm not sure if it's always clear how to pursue them, but a lot of that is me being a noob I'm sure, and I'm stumbling along!

There is some RP that's hard to access, and it's easy to be overlooked in scenes as a newbie unless you have a close relation there to introduce you around, but to a degree that's just normal social stuff. The @randomscene for newbies is a nice incentive, though it wears off fast and mostly leads to people drive-by posing you those first few weeks before forgetting you. Still, it's something.

I will say that watching people talk about XP on the family channels etc, it seems like the game is already totally off the rails dinosaur wise. People talk about spending 1k+ xp for a new stat, plus everyone also has all these bodyguards, animals, many of which I've heard discussed having stats that would easily eclipse starter PCs. It's not much of an issue for me as a non-combative, although I did spectacularly fail the first thing I was asked to roll, and it felt kind of crappy being hit with that investigating my main plot-hook. You'd think they might have rolled stuff my character had more than 4 dice in, when it was clearly the first thing she'd do as a new character with baby stats. I'm trying to bring them up and I've raked in a good bit of xp, but for non-combat, you run into the problem of not knowing WHAT skills will be relevant or even asked for, and their anti jack-of-all trades things could easily punish you there.

Er, that was long, but I want to stress that my experience has been far more positive more than not. The sad fact is it's often easier to talk about negatives, because the positives - well, they're great? What else do you say?

[surreality]

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

<facebook>"Share" if you remember random emitters for everything from weather to room ambience; "Like" if it made you grit your teeth.</facebook>

I actually love these and always have. I also recognize that many people don't. That's why I support everyone who loves them to definitely use them -- but to please have a way that the people who hate them can turn them off, since they can get repetitive, and make them opt-in at the outset. You can always do special announcement/custom things that everyone really needs to see (like a game-wide announcement that a bomb just went off, etc.) unfiltered in a different way so folks still see the stuff that's relevant/genuinely unique and important.

[Roz]

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

I will say that watching people talk about XP on the family channels etc, it seems like the game is already totally off the rails dinosaur wise. People talk about spending 1k+ xp for a new stat, plus everyone also has all these bodyguards, animals, many of which I've heard discussed having stats that would easily eclipse starter PCs.

While I do hear people talk about spending the 1k+ (and sometimes 2k+) for a legendary stat/skill, I've yet to hear about anyone getting close to it at all. If anyone manages, it'll likely because they've been saving and not raising any other stats/skills.

[DeadEmpire]

@Roz Came to say pretty much that. Normally they're comparing their xp tax. Since all 6 skills have a base cost of 1000 it makes it easy top determine how much your xp/tax is. So if the skill costs 1350, the xp tax is 35%