@Thenomain said:
One of my more vocal/angry/forceful posts apparently (I am inferring) caused a regular poster to quit, so I am no longer going to share my opinion on the Optional Realities boards.
This also means I'm not going to be reading the articles. It was one of the articles that I flipped my shit over, due to how poorly thought-out and limited it was. I imagine my response was the kind of response that causes people to not want to engage with.
I suspected that my assessment of the articles was going to remain on the 50/50 (solid 'C') range for what I would expect in content; the quality of writing was about what I'd expect for a fan 'zine so eh who cares about that. The good articles were good. It's up to you, the reader, to decide if it's worth finding content that interests you.
Best of luck, OR.
Just to be clear over here, because we posted as much on OR, Leah didn't leave OR because of anything you said. I'm not going to discuss a private issue, more than to say it had to do with OR's moderating of off-topic threads, and her feelings towards the policy.
Obviously, like I've said in the past, it's totally true that the quality and accessibility of the articles is going to vary author to author. For instance, I put a lot of thought into the three articles that I've written for OR, but they are largely specific to people interested in designing their own game and thus not all of them are universal. That's okay, in my opinion.
OR is an ambitious hobbyist effort (while some of us are writers, none of us are game journalists -- except for @Brody), that primarily gets used for two reasons: conversation between developers that wouldn't often communicate otherwise, and player feedback and discussion about various games that help paint more specific pictures of those games for folks who might be considering playing them. A lot of players in our community weren't aware of how many games there are that are similar to their main game, and it's a great thing to be able to refer them to a new game when they need a break from their current play-space. It can only help with player retention in the community -- or, at least, that's the idea.
I don't think you really ruffled any feathers over at OR, though. You were a little aggressive sometimes, but mostly reasonable. No flame wars started over what you posted. I wouldn't worry about you having a negative impact on OR at all: you didn't.
My personal involvement with the running of OR and its articles is pretty much over at this point, if only because I needed more time for the development of my current projects. Running the October contest was sort of my last big involvement on the staff side of OR for a while. That said, I'll still write articles from time to time, and I still participate in the conversation there. It's a good community of people that are doing things. In an era of MU* stagnation, there's something to be said for that.
@Kireek
I have no idea who you are, or what you're talking about. I get that you're talking about me, and Project Redshift, but what don't I value in terms of transparency? I'm ... actually, like, one of the biggest proponent of transparency in ethics culture on Optional Realities, to the point where even my fellow Redshift team thinks that I'm too pro transparency.
I'm curious as to how you think my/our (probably my, as the designer of the game systems for the engine) policies on ethics/transparency might negatively impact my design of the Evennia-based engine that we've built. If you've thoughtful concerns, things that I haven't considered, that might be helpful to me. If you've concerns built on misconception or something along those lines, I'd love to have the chance to set you at ease.
Beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot on OR in October that I felt was particularly of interest to MSB in terms of articles ... but I do think some folks here might find our three winning short Interactive Fiction games interesting, from October's monthly creative contest:
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=339.0
To note is that @Griatch walked away with the top prize in last month's contest.