Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning

[gasket]

@FiranSurvivor

It appears more to be Round 452 or thereabouts of Theno using a half-million words where "Sorry, I was a dick," would suffice and serve him much better.

[WTFE]

Yes. Arx is looking better and better every time I peek in here. None of its advocates come across as crazy and obsessed whatsoever.

[Meg]

@WTFE I suspect that is sarcasm. On the internet. I don't think we are crazy or obsessed, though. I don't think the argument was really about ansi at all, tbh. Some of us want shit to be friendly and positive. I like nice things. Idk, man, idk.

[WTFE]

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

I don't think we are crazy or obsessed, though.

YOU don't come across as crazy or obsessed, no…

I don't think the argument was really about ansi at all, tbh.

No. It was about a crazy person going out of his/her way to show how crazy he/she is by latching on to everything conceivable as a reason to go off into hysterics.

Some of us want shit to be friendly and positive.

Might I suggest reining in those on "your side" who seem not to share that goal? Like maybe gently asking KwazyKwest to recuse his/herself from dealing with Thenomain? I mean I don't even get along with Thenomain 90% of the time and think that KwazyKwest is off in fucking la-la-land in his/her dealings with him.

[ThugHeaven]

Here we go again.

[Goyim]

Don't be rude
Please respect tables ┬─┬ノ(ಠ_ಠノ)
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Jk fuck the tables ┻━┻︵ ╰( ° ͜ʖ͡°)╭∩╮

[Meg]

@WTFE

I slept on this and thought about it so I could make sure that I wasn't wading back in in a reactionary way. But I have to disagree; I'm sorry. I don't think you're being fair to Kanye Qwest.

Kanye Qwest has some consistent, repeatable, pretty obvious buttons. She is protective of her people. That includes Apostate and Tehom, of course, but she has also taken all of us on Arx as her people (which I like a lot, tbh). And Thenomain was being a dick about something one of her people did. (He's admitted he was being dickish, we all can agree, whatever.) It may have even been a 'brush off your shoulder' insult for some people (I'm not here to weigh insults, either), but you definitely have to know by reading even a bit of what Kanye Qwest has written before, that this is going to push a button.

And it didn't really have to be Thenomain. I know it seems like it's Thenomain a lot, but she has been consistent, on game and on this thread, in wanting to make sure that people aren't doing things that will stomp on other people's fun. The message wasn't just for one person.

You can't call a doorbell crazy and overreactive if you go to press it 20 times.

[Ganymede]

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

You can't call a doorbell crazy and overreactive if you go to press it 20 times.

You can call it "malfunctioning" if you don't press it and it goes off, though, right?

I always advise staff: do not defend your game. This also means do not defend your players and do not defend other staff. You don't need to do it, and the players and staff can defend themselves if they wish to.

By all means, defend yourself or your policies, but you need not do anything about others. In my 20 years, I have never once asked or expected my staff to defend me as a player or fellow staff member. And I don't recall anyone, in those years, demanding the same of me when I was staff, or telling me that "staff failed to defend me against this mean person on SWOFA/WORA/forum hate-pit."

So, don't. Fucking don't.

Because we're not doorbells. We should have our own senses of discretion.

Arx is still a pretty nifty game.

[surreality]

@Meg I'm going to have to disagree here about the 'fairness' factor.

I am speaking broadly here, and I am also speaking as someone who will absolutely fight tooth and nail for people and projects I believe in. (Read: I empathize strongly with the drive you are describing.)

I'm one of of those people who hates the use of ANSI in descs and truly loathes ASCII art on M*s. Despise it. Hate it with all of the hatey hate hateface I can muster. I've banned it by policy on my projects because I find it unpleasantly distracting and inappropriate for a descriptive text medium, and often enough, have run across people who have more serious (visual problems) issues with it than my primarily taste-based and philosophical ones. Do I have anything against folks who enjoy it or think there's something wrong with them? Not in the least. Different tastes, different strokes for different folks, etc. -- life goes on either way. (I would consider something like an art gallery or bboard or similar thing for this specific purpose fair game for something like this, admittedly, and think that could actually be pretty neat.)

I felt no need to comment about it in regard to a game I don't play on. It is in no way my business in that case and frankly, I have very little energy to bother with most things lately. However, that will rarely stop anyone from commenting about something on the forums, for better or worse. (Lord knows I've commented plenty re: random things on games I don't and wouldn't play on, usually with why, would expect the same on threads for my stuff and have seen precisely that -- and I consider that entirely reasonable for people to do.)

There are reasonable times to rush in to defense. There are also considerably less reasonable ones. I'd call this the latter, for one reason: "Ugh, I don't like <whatever>!" is not a demand that something be considered wrongfun -- and to insist that it is so is to declare something wrongthink, which I, personally, find considerably more distressing on a number of levels. People are allowed to not like a thing just as they are allowed to like it, or you are not simply going for 'live and let live, leave people alone to enjoy their kind of fun' (which is a positive goal) and hedging much closer to 'how dare you state your dislike for something other people like, you're bad and you should feel bad! It's now all right for someone to jump in your face and attack you!'.

Not everyone is going to enjoy everything, and that is also OK. In an ideal world, people would be polite in conveying their lack of interest or dislike, but that's not how things tend to go down all the time (or even often, really). When it looks like somebody can't handle that without exploding into a frothy attack dog? I don't think I'm the only one who notices, and it's (unfortunately) not the good kind of notice.

It also comes across as being entirely closed to criticism from where I sit -- and I don't actually believe that's true of any of the people involved here, so that's something I consider a bit worrying. Does it look that way? Sadly -- no snark intended, it's distressing to say so, especially since I hold @Apos in fairly high regard -- it is coming across that way at the moment. Which I don't think is intended. And it's precisely because I don't think it's intended that I'm saying anything at all. (I wouldn't bother if I thought y'all gave none fucks. I know you do, and that a great deal of work has gone into this. That has big respect from me and I don't want to see that effort hindered by something this dumb.)

All in all, someone can have a two dozen kickass qualities and still have two or three that, to put it as tactfully as possible, could use some work. (That's something that is doubtless true of absolutely everyone on these forums and I do not exempt myself at all.)

Accepting the existence of the not-so-awesome things does not diminish the genuine quality of the kickass ones, and turning a blind eye to the traits any given person has that could use some work serves no one's best interest. The bad isn't a disqualifier -- but the good doesn't make the bad a non-issue, either. The bad still needs examination and probably some work, and the good still deserves praise and encouragement.

People have been more than fair to @Kanye-Qwest on these forums, just like they've been fair to me when I've gone attack dog defense mode in a very similar way. Actually being fair does not mean it gets hand-waved into nothingness or not called out for what it is. Ultimately, that does someone an enormous disservice, especially in the long run.

[Roz]

I think it was fair for me to say "that's rude" when @Thenomain called something someone else had made "vomit."

I also have a lot of affection and respect for @Kanye-Qwest based on her work on Arx. She's really integral to a lot of the cultural aspects of the game that I really value.

THAT SAID. I think she should probably stop responding to Theno in general (and vice versa) because it always tends to blow up. And, like has been pointed out, it doesn't offer a great view into things for people reading the thread.

[Arkandel]

I have the following comment to make.

In a thread much like this one someone followed a general "personally I don't like this concept" objection with bukkake. I feel they got frowned at considerably less than Theno did for not liking ANSI/ASCII art.

We're not being fair, and by doing so we're diminishing people whose histories should speak for themselves. No one is doubting Kanye's value to Arx (even though she'd prone to cranking it to eleven on issues that matter to her) and it'd be foolish to doubt Thenomain's character and overall maturity (even though he's prone to assuming his way is the right way).

But take those two quirks away and does either of those people seem bad? I've disagreed strongly with both on a variety of issues in the past, and I don't think so. So why don't we step back a bit - from a topic about ANSI art, are we in the nineties again! - and go back to talking about Arx?

[Bananerz]

I too find ansi in a text game annoying, although I'll also include actually having items as well is annoying because you'll have to deal with the db bloat that comes due to player hoarding. Just give a command to allow a character to adjust their descriptions for clothing with +outfit and ensure a policy is in place that you need dots in resource to cover it. Colour for me should convey meaning and information on a text game, so it's slightly frustrating when people look like rainbows especially with hugely long descriptions (thank goodness for quicklook).

I've found that I never look at what a person is wearing, much less actually looking at a particular item.

[Kanye Qwest]

I don't actually care what any of you think I should be doing, or should not be doing. Arx is not my job, it's my hobby. If you want to play because we are trying to facilitate fun and story, great! If you don't want to play there for any reason up to and including me, also great!

[Meg]

@surreality

I think where my objections to 'not fair' comes in is boiling everything that happened down to a generic label of 'crazy'. One, I hate that fucking word. Two, it's reductive to the conversation.

There are things to be discussed re: interactions, but dismissing everything out of hand as crazy and obsessive, especially when someone is poking at buttons that have been demonstrated over and over--

Not fair?

(And editing to be clear that I don't think those discussions are mine to have either, Kanye Qwest. You are right that this is your hobby and it is your choice of what you want to do. I will leave those discussions to staff.)

[Misadventure]

Any plans to add new elements to whatever Arx has brewing?

By new I mean like if you didn't have warfare before you would now, or technology changes, or whatever.

[Kanye Qwest]

Lots! If you mean systems, next up will be disguises/crime, which will be a way for criminal characters to do 'task' like things off screen, heists and such, and increase their criminal renown..as well as their infamy with the Iron Guard/Inquisition. There's also dominion coming, PRP GM tools, exploration rooms, etc.

If you mean on the IC side of things, it's inevitable that at some point (provided the game doesn't end because we all get petrified tomorrow) Arx will have a magical re-awakening, instead of a technological leap forward.

[ThatGuyThere]

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

You can't call a doorbell crazy and overreactive if you go to press it 20 times.

But in theory humans have self control and self awareness until the rise of Skynet doorbells have neither.

[Monogram]

@ThatGuyThere I was going to say it's just an environment created by the Matrix, but that's just as good.

[Misadventure]

@Kanye-Qwest What is a dominion system, specifically? I am guessing its is a resource management type thing, but what are the features, and are any of them particularly new or handled differently?

Will the magical awakening figure into the dominion and military stuffs? How about the crime stuff? I'm thinking old school Bloodshadows, or Blades in the Dark type stuff, using small and large magics to get things done in new ways.

(Those are both RPGs with magic. Bloodshadows in sort of hard boiled neon lit detective in a very very not 1930s fantasy world, the latter is somewhat like Mistborn, but closer to D&D style magical world crime.)

[Arkandel]

After playing for a few days on Arx, some thoughts.

• I really really like its investigative/task/support system. It's pretty smart that it's built so not only are there diminishing returns to getting backing up by the same people, you can't support your own primary faction - so you can't just have a huge House circle-jerking support, as it's implied that it's a given, and all those people need to go out there and recruit others to help.

• I'm torn about resource management. Basically the way it works (to my understanding) is larger Houses have more money to give out but also, typically, more people. So Lord Bob of House Large can choose to share the wealth and buy everyone a small present or play favorites, buy a couple of people a Death Star and piss off the rest - plus it makes smaller, well populated Houses' players even more short on cash. That's both a good thing (since it makes sense, it's realistic and life ain't fair, plus it gives leaders meaningful choices to make) and bad (since some players will feel bad about it).

• My main concern is the suggestion someone made that at times support is given for OOC reasons. While staff has made it clear it's not cool to apply OOC pressure ("hey, did you back me up for my zoo project yet??") there's no real way to regulate trading favors OOC without RP and without running the game as a police state - which I agree it shouldn't be. And although I've watched people get bitched at on channels by staff about trying to get favors for their alts, once again it's pretty hard to track down alt-circlejerking trading.

• I haven't done combat at all so far, despite playing a soldier type, so no idea how the balance works yet. I've heard some bellyaching about dino-monsters but no idea if that's true either.

• The randomscene idea is excellent, more MU* should use it. Basically every week it generates a list of people you can RP with for extra XP and every newbie is also on that list automatically... so as soon as you get in suddenly there're a bunch of people trying to play with you for their own good. Big thumbs up for that.

• Getting settled into the metaplot is a bitch and a half. It's probably the worst thing about the game, at least for me, because so much has happened and it takes a lot of reading to catch up. Arx can probably really benefit from a very basic 101 page somewhere, giving the fundamental facts and nothing else but links to where you can learn more.

• My former major concern - the lack of PrPs - doesn't apply any more. They are doable, and due to code limitations they are even light on mechanics which for me at least is the best case scenario. But others' mileage may vary.

More established players will likely have better insights, these are mine.