@ThatGuyThere To my understanding, the fief management WAS tested and vetted, but they changed power levels multiple times for the units and kept the rule book to themselves. I'm pretty sure @bored and I both made requests to see the staff playbook but a game that derives game mechanics based not on rules of the game but players specifically not knowing the rules of game is not a real game.
It's Calvinball.
Oh, here's some constructive advice:
If there is ever a voting system, don't stuff it with arbitrary NPCs that are designed to give staff whatever vote outcome regardless of the PCs voting, keep the rules opaque, and then change things up when the voting is seeming to go the other way.
Staff blatantly stacked a vote to Amber's favor and when I secured enough votes to overturn the decision, staff padded Amber's faction votes to prevent an overturn of the decision. Amber still complained.
I will say that I never asked for loyal subjects. But was it so much to ask to not have PC and NPC subjects who were hell bent on driving a coup from Day One? Lyov's reign on behalf of his father was intentionally very vanilla and bland, per background. All the tax and military levies were moderate or light and Lyov was in the process of reversing some of his father's gross excesses and shifting some of those policies to the Jakovians.
To wit, Lyov had the ability to pretty much pull a trigger and get a free kill-a-baron-with-total-impunity card or a free kill-a-marquis-with-light-impunity card or a free kill-a-countess-and-still-be-okay card. But I felt that playing that hand was just asking for OOC drama and any boon that P or Lex throws at you is guaranteed to do a dramatic fail and kill off half your troops.
In hindsight, shit would've been so much quieter in Auberry if I just killed Chiaka when she started getting uppity and especially when she started conspiring with Amber to dislodge me. I'm sure @bored ICly wouldn't be happy but I'm pretty sure half the game would be cheering ICly and OOCly. She was a terrible baroness anyway. Her entire barony's infrastructure and economy was geared to supporting her boondoggle space ship.
Frankly, I got wind pretty quickly that Paulus' idea of a 'second chance' was to stack the cards in such a manner that my PC could not hope to succeed but because somehow he somehow scryed that it was 'what I would have wanted with my PC.' That's what rapists say.
@mietze said:
If Chiaka player was telling you that, with respect, I might take it with at least a little grain of salt.
I mean it could very well have happened, but given my experiences with her where she was saying she was told or had to do things that I knew for a fact ICly and OOCly the opposite was said (because I was there), I mean she is I'm sure a very nice lady but not exactly very reliable. At least in almost all of my experiences with her.
I don't think anyone on that game was a sick person. I do think that in some ways though players were encouraged to be at each other's throats. It lead to a lot of frustration. I got to hear all kinds of things on all sides, because while 2 of my PCs were at least minimally involved in politics, both were somewhat neutral as well, at least on the surface.
Everyone had the same complaints about favoritsm and staff set up. Given that that started to happen on RfK as well I am wondering if it isn't endemic to understaffing when hardly anyone is getting responses to anything, things crawl to a halt or there's unsatisfying pace or advancement, somewhat of a communication breakdown, and in the absence of a very unifying personality (as Shava tended to be) the people start turning on each other out of frustration and safe target.
Chiaka and I had stopped being on speaking terms barely midway into my tenure and I tried my best to have my agents deal with her because she would go into histrionics midway into any scene with me OOC. With Amber, she flat out refused to talk to my PC (despite being a major Count) because her PC ICly hated the Decados and because she had some sort of gripe with my assets. Again, had to trade words via an emissary.
Star Crusade's staffing regime liked to talk and I managed to pull a lot of information from various players, some staffers, and often from the mouth of Paulus himself. Very little changed since Vargo.
@deadculture There definitely is a level of suffering. It's not that I suffer from a bad roll or IC misfortune, but the fact that in a MU*, unlike, say, an evening with Skyrim and Farkas as my companion/husband/pack mule, there are real personalities at play and real people who socialize not just on an IC level but on an OOC level.
Paulus was a sociopath in the most classic of definitions:
"...a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience."
Paulus lacked any sense of conscience for the sort of shenanigans he pulled. He pretty much simultaneously befriended you while talking about you behind your back as he was sucking up to you. There was one time where Paulus was talking to me, while also talking to Custodius. Custodius and I were trading notes on what Paulus was saying and using that as a sort of feedback loop to talk with Paulus.
Lextius is more of a psychopath:
"...a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior."
Lextius-run plots and anything that was touched by Lextius was a one-way ticket to a lot of headache for your PC and possibly the player based on the sort of actions and sadistic pleasure he took in playing PCs and players like pawns. I found Paulus to be tolerable because I suppose I understood his doublespeak. With Lextius, there was no doublespeak. It was a bull in a china shop and he took pleasure in screwing people over IC and OOC. That last bit was pretty well documented over the course of DBtS and FS: Vargo.
And again, I'm certainly no saint, but I like to think that I was on tolerable behavior for most of my tenure in Star Crusade til towards the end and I just stopped giving a shit. I dunno. Maybe I was worse than everyone else. Either way, I called bullshit pretty quickly and got out with a little online MU* dignity intact.
Apparently Paulus, from Day 1, was telling Chiaka OOCly to revolt against my PC. Nevermind that my PC came three days later onto the grid and I was still negotiating the terms of my PC.
I really resented Amber because she got to cherry pick her vassals (I got stuck with Chiaka because staff thought it would be a fun joke on me) and she still complained about shit (namely my shit) after she got more toys to play with in a safer County. Never mind that having a small cadre of Jakovian agents is thematic to a Decados Count and since the Jakovians were controlled by P, they were at best, people that dislike me but were fortuitously shooting in the same general direction.
Thol/Lextius intentionally reveled in the misery of others. If P was a lying sociopath, Lextius was an outright sadistic psychopath.
@silentsophia That same chick is one of the reasons why I had at least two major meltdowns. You're either referencing Amber and/or Chiaka. Either way, good riddance to both of them.
As much as I want a new FS game to pop up, it does go back to a MU* thesis of mine that the FS 'space' is too crowded with personalities that make it a bad fit for any long-standing MU* environment with any political/economic system. A vampire on the Reach can exist and idle out in a single breath with no one ever noticing. In FS, even if we are talking about the height of its popularity with 40-60 people signing on (some of those alts), pretty much everyone knows everyone else and most of those people despise each other in a weird interrelated manner.
I got the impression that Paulus knew Amber or someone who was close to Paulus did but I don't really remember what gave that impression.
Yara was a spy for P against Custodius and myself because P wanted to give us a 'second chance.' This is somewhat ironic... or fitting... since she was basically advertised as the ombudsman/PR for the staff roster. It was also a strange way to give us a 'second chance' when it was pretty damn clear what they were doing.
Mind, I actually was applying to be a tiny little baron and P suggested I be the Count of Auberry. I said I wanted to play a Hawkwood and he said I should play a Decados and he'd give me toys like Jakovians to sweeten the deal. I specifically requested that I be the Viscount/Son of said Count because I felt that if I was an outright Count, knowing my history with the staff roster, people would automatically be suspicious of me as a player. Making a deal with P was my first mistake because all deals with P is Faustian. In hindsight, I should have never made any deals and should never have voluntarily crippled my PC like I did.
Okay. In hindsight, I should have never played in Star Crusade. Next.
When dealing with Paulus, there is the official propaganda and reality.
Stats were also incredibly arbitrary unless you put your foot down and argued with staff. They would find pretty bizarre and labyrinthine ways to say no because THEY had a vision for your PC that you were supposed to just follow. Part of it was staff lottery. Certain staffers were extremely generous with statting and others were incredibly difficult to get decent rolls, even when staff was faced with disparate treatment between the same class of PCs being generated/similar backgrounds.
The bar for a successful FS game is pretty low:
No high level politics in PC hands;
Focus on questing and adventure vs Politics;
No overt/visible favoritism;
No Paulus and Thol in either staff or playing capacity; and
No arbitrary and random shit.
Hell, the bar is so low that if someone throws up a game a la chatroom and it has one room and relies on just dice code and we keep stats/chargen pen-and-paper... I'll play.
Like a story of a Hawkwood Knight, a Decados Intelligence Officer, a Muster mercenary, and an al-Malik pirate captain that are led around by an Eskatonic crazy who has been seeing visions about a mysterious MacGuffin. Each of them have their different agendas and there may be break out sessions where the GM can explore their personal motivations in the face of communications from home to secure the artifact. They have to work together because each one has bits and pieces of the puzzle... but want to secure the artifact for their own faction. Romances and historical animosities optional but highly recommended.
On their heels is a Li Halan fundamentalist who is trying to destroy said artifact but motivated/manipulated by a demon-possessed 'old' Li Halan lord, a rogue Hazat Dervish who blames one of the protagonists for the death of his sister, and a splinter group of Engineers orchestrating a coup against the local Muster warlord who controls the region where this search is going on. The Orthodox has gotten wind of this search and has their own interests in the region, armed with Avesti who threaten to burn down everything and anything that moves.
Depending on how the search ends, it radically changes the background for the next sprint. If the Decados acquires it, the Decados start out with certain bonuses that remain until something else changes. Or if the Li Halan demon lord takes possession, add malevolent spirits/zombies. Or if the Engineers win their coup, add tech components to the next sprint. If the Muster win, lots of guns... a whole lot of guns. If the Orthodox and Avesti 'win' well, Game Over, restart the table top to a place before the pivot point and tell your players not to fuck up again.
If there are multiple TT campaigns going on, a 'successful' end of a campaign in one side of the planet may suddenly affect conditions on the other side of the planet.
Yep. Moth to a flame. Drink more wine!
@Alzie Honestly, I haven't logged onto a MU* in months. It's amazing how much time gets freed up to do more meaningful stuff like sitting in front of your computer playing video games... er... catching up with friends and going on dates.
Because I totally have friends.
I haven't logged in or posted anything here in about that same time and I will say that I saw 'Fading Suns' and was drawn to it like a moth to a flame like a recovering cocaine addict on a free trip to Colombia.
Packrat, color me interested but considering the past record of Fading Suns games, I am pretty much convinced that all Fading Suns games are doomed to fail because of the personalities that inhabit the MU* space as well as the logistics of converting what is essentially a TT adventure into permanent, entrenched game with clear winners and losers in terms of game resources and plots. Competing interpretations of what Fading Suns thematically means, competing personalities with baggage, and zero-sum games are hostile for success. I don't think I ever had any direct conflicts with you, at least in terms of Star Crusade, but you have long been associated with the clique that involved Principe, Thol, Yara, and off and on Custodius and while I ain't a saint, I would wager the appetite for a third chance is wanting on all sides.
That said, if you want an unsolicited and probably unwanted suggestion based on who I am, I would create a clear capital city to play off of with high level NPCs keeping things calm while PCs tend to be low level adventurers in the line of shadowrun-style fetch quests or a total backwater that gets sucked into the political plays of the planet but the players are largely autonomous in their ability to murder each other with sharp pointy sticks in their third world toilet.
Good luck.
-Apollonius/Arcosanti/Caius/Lyov
@Jaded, holy crap. That's an amazing amount of info and put things in more perspective than me fumbling through the game. I'm on Hard but not Death March and I'm still having trouble even with like-leveled creatures if there's enough of them running around and hitting me at once. I have to either pick them off with a crossbow from a perfect range or pray. That and the constant scrounge for food because anything past Normal and you don't have a fast enough auto-heal through meditating.
Yeah, I'm still in the Skyrim mentality that fast + good weapons = more dps because you will consistently land more attacks over a wide period of time. This is not entirely untrue but it plays out differently with the Witcher 3, especially in a multi-combat setting.
I've totally ignored Igni despite it being one of the few ways to properly deal splash damage because Axii is generally what I use for larger critters and spamming Quen in the case of mass groups. I'm the type that will max out Axii just to get more conversation types and Axii out any potential combat situations. That said, my current playthrough is a slower trudge because my skillset as a player is not keeping up with the game's difficulty. I'll have to practice some based on the insight above.
I've heard of the PC controls for Witcher 1 and 2. They sound awful. Even with Witcher 3, I have it hooked up to an XBox 360 controller. It's still clunky and has weird UI design choices. The worst part of it is having to relearn how to play a different RPG because invariably all of them have different means of attack.
Does anyone actually use strong attack? Fast attack + roll + quen or axii is pretty much my mainstay. Igni and Aard are pretty damn useless or situational at best, and I've only seen a difference in yrden for wraiths. Am I missing something with these? Or are they as useless as half of the potions I can make?
Jumping into the Witcher 3 bandwagon, instead of paying full price for Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC, I decided to take a stab at everyone's currently favorite Polish RPG. I've tried to keep details vague to keep from even mild spoilers.
It's pretty good so far, glitchy as hell. There is one mission that is broken because a key NPC spawns underneath an inaccessible bridge and in the stonework. Multiple crashes and other issues despite waiting a few months for them to iron them out. I'm on 1.08.
I feel like the Witcher 3 will have exactly one more play through, generally going through a different world state and choices. Possibly a different romance interest. I have only briefly played Witcher 1 and Witcher 2. The Witcher 2 controls were downright horrible which was sad because I paid a decent chunk of change for it back on my Xbox 360. Controls are more responsive, generally combat is fine once past the learning curve (at the difficulty right below the highest, I'm still getting mauled to death if I charge in and not pay attention to what I'm fighting). Glitches in combat have resulted in deaths that pissed me off but I'll admit I don't have the trigger reflex to do anything other than guzzle potions and mash fast attack.
I like the more structured aspect of the game rather than the free-for-all in Skyrim or the sort of forced plots of DA:I. I do miss the ability to kill random NPCs (Skyrim) and the ability to shack up with anyone I damn well please (DA:I). I do understand that this is a novel-anchored game and Geralt has a firm existing story. There are a bunch of NPCs I want to straight out murder and other NPCs than the legacy romances for Geralt that I'd much rather ignite a new relationship with than get saddled with overwhelming baggage... but it's partially my fault and a lack of attachment to some of the series mainstays.
I'm not entirely done with the game so far. I'm frankly having fun just going around town and collecting Gwent cards. :S
@Thenomain iTunes IS unusable. It would gobble up 50-75% of the system memory for no reason on my Windows PC and even 'off' but not really off, it would still eat a big chunk of my system resources. The idea that it was worse on a Mac defies belief... and yet can be validated just on my prior experiences with the Apple ecosystem. But at the time, it was a huge step up from the alternatives (WinAmp was still my first love) and only recently have media players caught up to some very easy user interface choices that Apple made over, say, RealPlayer.
Sprint has (had?) a back door unlimited plan for really cheap if you were a prior customer or had an employee code. It was only like $70 for unlimited data but it had hard throttles after a certain amount of data used like T-Mobile's unlimited. The only truly unlimited plans are legacy plans grandfathered in and you have to pay hand over fist (they won't let you upgrade a phone at subsidy while charging you for the cost of a phone and the service) AND they'll do everything in their power to make sure that unlimited plan no longer works for you.
But then you'd have to use Sprint.
Honestly, I liked Sprint. The desperation in their business model by the time I signed up with them in 2010 meant they bent over backwards for you to retain you. But I wasn't getting good service indoors at work (I did work at a refitted-but-still-reinforced munitions holding warehouse on the waterfront) and I ended up consolidating my plan with my parents plan on Verizon for cheap. I've threatened to jump ship to T-Mobile a few times now because every new activation has encountered all sorts of unexpected problems with my account. I suspect something was set up wrong when I assumed control of my parents' account, which meant pulling my line out of their plan, making it the primary line, and bringing in the other lines.
Also, T-Mobile's rural coverage is atrocious. Even when Sprint clings to 3G, T-Mobile has no service at all even an hour outside of the Washington DC suburbs.
I don't like how Samsung closed out the battery and microSD card slots for the S6 but I do like how it looks. I'm also a crazy person who does not put a case around it. I do put a case around my Samsung Note 4 Edge because that's my work phone and I tend to drop it more frequently both because of size and getting irate with someone at work.
Honestly, I could care less about the microSD slot. It does happen to be slower than a native flash chip for certain tasks like burst photos and I never fill up more than 16GB anyway (although I bought a 64GB S6 Edge because it was the only one available at the time). I take a lot of photos, I take some movies, and at most, I have maybe 4-5 hours of music for the times when I will be in an area with no data service. Otherwise, I just stream Pandora and call it a day. I have a 6GB plan. My parents are also on it plus my work phone, but it's basically 6GB by myself and I only use up maybe 2-3GB a month average. I'm sure the needs will increase over time but I don't have many downloaded apps because I try to keep a clean environment for all of my machines. I don't keep any full length video like TV shows in internal storage.
...I also do have a second phone that DOES have a microSD card slot. I may be cheating.
There's lower fidelity streaming that is not bandwidth intensive and Pandora is not nearly at 320kbps even in its HQ streaming.
I am pondering dabbling into a Windows 10 phone when such a thing comes out so I can see the unity of OS in the live on machines designed to take full advantage of Windows 10. I have an iPad for light browsing, an ipod touch, and APPL stock, but those are all legacy items for when iTunes was the only game in town before Amazon came to being for digital music/streaming services. I'd rather dispense with the Android/Chrome OS and sit on a single platform because I don't like the fragmentation of system knowledge just amongst my own devices.
But Microsoft has yet to win me their trust with Windows 10... which just crashed when I tried to sort my downloads by Tile rather than Details.
I hate it when someone has their mic on and it picks up ambient noise... or they're actively having a wild party and clearly speaking non-English with spicy salsa music.
My biggest concern as a player is being a perpetually mediocre carry. I feel like I'm building things wrong or just not having the right builds fast enough and getting eclipsed rapidly in the game to being useless. I often find myself lending a decisive hand to what would otherwise be a close game with a good team or floundering completely with a mediocre to bad team. My current primary char has been Wraith Lord for the past 10 or so games, with a roughly 2:1 win/loss ratio at Level 4-6.
I have close to 2.8K hours of Crusader Kings 2. Dota2 only has about 50 hours so far.
The person who wanted me to play has incidentally stopped playing for the most part. 
I have Windows 8.1 Enterprise on my workhorse work/gaming machine. It works just fine and I have had no issue with it.
I upgraded my travel work laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10... and then promptly downgraded before upgrading again.
What?
So my laptop is about 80% used for work. It had an old Cisco VPN client and an old Sonicwall VPN client. I don't know which one was the offending party but it doesn't matter now. Windows 10's upgrade will detect that VPN and just not properly install your wifi drivers. So no wifi, at all. There is a workaround but that workaround failed for me. The in-place upgrade from 8.1 to 10 resulted in my inability to uninstall those VPN clients because the OS 'was corrupted.' I hope I don't have to uninstall anything else and run into that same problem.
It works fine now but this was two hours of my life wasted. Also, after finally getting used to Windows 8.1, I do regret all the changes they made for Windows 10 which is a retrograde to the Windows 7 days for those who opted to skip a generation. I used to be able to do a quick two scroll view of all my apps in the old Metro UI that is now all janky and confused with the 'new' Start button.
Cortana is fairly useless because it is not clear what she can actually do and what she will do and then what she can do but won't. I'm sure there's an instruction guide somewhere. She'll sing you a song but only a preset group of songs. You can ask her anything but most of the time, she'll just show you Bing search results.
Microsoft also continues their long legacy of their browsers not being compatible with their enterprise-class products. I don't know if it has been resolved since I last checked on my laptop but Edge will not work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Luckily, they have legacy IE support, but I don't understand how hard it is to just make their browsers work with their own products. This was a serious issue when CRM 2011 was only operational with Microsoft IE... and Microsoft IE 10 was not compatible. For about two months, I think every CRM company was inundated with hate mail til they were given the workaround of using Compatibility Mode or CRM 2011 was updated to a new roll up (which requires a huge amount of testing to be rolled out for end users) to be compatible with all browsers.
I like Cortana in principle. I like Edge in principle. I like to keep all of my tech stuff in sync and up to date with the latest stuff, especially since none of the Windows 10 improvements are going to flow down to 8.1 which is pretty much totally obsolete. But I'm not clamoring for a replacement of my Windows 8.1 Enterprise installs on my NAS and my work machine. Windows 10 has a lot to iron out.
What is everyone's experience in the MOBA space? I used to play when DOTA was still hosted by Warcraft 3 but stopped because of things like law school and other newer games. I've recently been dragged into DOTA 2 after a brief foray into Heroes of Newerth and DOTA 2 ain't bad, if mildly repetitive.
I'm curious as to whether or not some other poor soul is trapped playing endless DOTA game after DOTA game.
