@ixokai said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Generally speaking, heavily coded isn't, BUT, they seem to be wanting to take cues from MUSHes that the coding isn't for RP things but instead stuff like crafting and direct combat, which I'm more okay with.
Mushes are pretty much my favorite storytelling format for any kind of role-playing, so I definitely don't wanna detract from that. Just give a few more tools that might be useful, rather than would get in the way.
A little lore intro that might be helpful, since I've gotten asked for a little more about the theme/lore:
An excerpt from Scholar Tobias the Dubious's "A Brief History of Arvum":
"Early histories, before the founding of the great capital city of Arx, are poor enough to drive any dedicated scholar to drink. Incomplete at best, maddeningly vague, contradictory, and written in a poetic style far more concerned with the weave of a good tale to make a better song, not a one before The Reckoning can be relied upon.
A scholar then relies only upon what we can be reasonably certain is true, rather than being another small voice contributing to the great cacophony of dubious history. We know this to be true: the great noble houses of the realm predate the Reckoning by at least centuries, and we can place the time of the Reckoning at roughly a thousand years ago.
"What was the Reckoning?" A question only a child or foreigner from outside of Arvum might ask, since every man or woman grown in the Realm knows the tale. A thousand years ago, men had grown arrogant enough to ignore the warnings of the gods to not meddle with the dark realm beyond the Mirror. Magic, the writers of the time tell us, was too strong a lure and the gods were forgotten in the face of the great power the dark forces on the other side were willing to bestow upon willing petitioners. Scholars should remain skeptical of these tales. Much and more of this is surely poetry, the metaphor and allegory of the writers of the day to represent man's hubris, since we have little evidence that magic or demons or any of the like ever truly existed. None the less, the tales tell us that the practice of dark magic grew so wide-spread, that the demons were finally able to cross into our world in a great sundering we all call the Reckoning. The new invaders had little interest in being the minions of mere mortal men, and set upon a great war of subjugation, exterminating all in the realm that refused to bend the knee before the demonic onslaught.
We scholars can presume that such a great war did happen, though were they demons? It seems wiser to presume that the invaders were some great host from another continent, men of a fierce sort certainly, but men none the less. We can likewise agree with the tales that the houses fell one after another, outmatched by these invaders, whatever their nature. And we can find some veracity in the claims of what happened next. The great noble houses, finding themselves pushed to the brink of extinction and annihilation, banded together in one great last stand, creating the fortress of Arx.
The priests tell us that the gods themselves defended in the final battle of the Reckoning, throwing back the demons. Each great house has their own heroes that echo back to those halcyon days, with their own tales of valor and final victory as they threw back the demonic host from Arx. We can imagine there is a grain of truth in all the tales, if only the great battle of Arx was made of mere men fighting other men of a fiercer sort. We do know the traditions that arise from the founding of Arx as the last bastion that saved the realm; the family of each of the great houses traditionally live in Arx, even if though the seat of their power still resides in the capital city of their homelands. At the time of the Reckoning, the Compact was not as we know it today. One of the kings spoke as first among equals, but power was still equal between each of the houses, and the Compact lost all meaning in the centuries of rebuilding that followed the time of the Reckoning, even if Arx grew and prospered as a central hub between each of the five kingdoms of Arvum.
All five of the kingdoms of Arvum had been ravaged during the Reckoning, with few men surviving outside of Arx's protective walls. Some descendants of those survivors still harry and trouble the kingdoms today, uncivilized clans that cite a thousand year-old grievance of being abandoned and left outside of Arx's protection, and do not obey the Compact's right and proper ban on the practice of witchcraft and magic. The Abandoned, as they call themselves, are hardly a threat to the great houses and their kingdoms, but are a sad reminder that not even our greatest victory came without cost.
We can presume it was one of these sad tribes that harried our ancestors terribly during the centuries of rebuilding. Commonfolk and legends will call these new enemies the elves, but wise scholars are advised to take such names with a great deal of skepticism. Riding on beasts of the forest, creating great living siege weapons of earth and tree, wielding fantastic magic- all these are the stories that are told of the elves, who had grown furious that the expansion of man resettling the lands lost during the Reckoning threatened lands they now claimed. Skirmishes led to small wars, which were settled in fragile peace treaties, and so it went for generations during rebuilding. A particularly bloody war led the soft hearted King Alaron Grayson to seek a lasting peace with the elves, bringing the heads of the great houses to meet with the elf king at a great peace summit under a flag of truce.
Unfortunately, the King of the Compact was more kindly than wise, and the peace summit was an elaborate trap, where these treacherous so-called elves slew the king and most of the great leaders of the day, then proceeded to launch a devastating war against all of the kingdoms of Arvum, intent on wiping out men for good and all.
The king left no sons, and the great houses were in chaos from the deaths of their own leaders, with a number of the heirs unprepared for the ferocity of the unexpected attack by the elves. The king had left only a daughter, and every great house followed male primogeniture, which left all in doubt of the young woman's capacity to rule, and the elves did not take her seriously as a threat. The elves mocked the very notion, sending to Arx the defiled remains of the king, with his head to be delivered to his daughter. But that young woman would go down in history as Queen Alarice the Great, known as the Elvenbane, First of her name and the greatest ruler House Grayson ever produced.
It was Queen Alarice that rallied the great houses, invoking the almost forgotten Compact for mutual defense that had not seen the houses fight as one since the days of the Reckoning, starting the count of the calendars we still use to this day. It was Queen Alarice that led the armies of the Compact, taking back the lands of Arvum inch by bloody inch. And it was Queen Alarice that killed the Elven King in single combat, driving out the so called elves for good and all, and founding the Elfbone Throne. Many of the traditions we still honor, such as the right of the eldest child regardless of gender to inherit are derived from her reign, and the High Kings and Queens have often been seen as the true ruler of Arvum rather than just an arbitrator of disputes between the greatest of houses. Sadly, in the last five hundred years, few of our rulers could prove her equal.
It is in one of these troubled times that we now live. The young King Alaric Grayson, Fourth of His Name, has fallen ill and is unable to rule. The regent Bisland is torn between the different competing interests of the Great Houses, and the young king has no issue of his body, with no obvious heir remaining. In times of old, this would mean the Compact elects a new high king of their number, but no election has been forthcoming. We face not the myths and dangers of the past, but the ambitions of all those mighty enough to wield power in Arx. Those ambitions are dangerous indeed."
I like it a lot. I think some players might need to be nudged to explain how they got from Point A to Point B, but shit that happens in regular BGs anyways.
I'm actually a little optimistic for the future, even though I share pretty much your concerns identically.
I think the MU format offers something unique that's very difficult to duplicate in any other RP format, but the way it's designed right now is extremely difficult for anyone new to get into, it has no way at all of introducing people to it except by word of mouth, and almost any change in format alienates its shrinking pool of enthusiasts.
Those are are definitely problems, but I don't think they are insurmountable ones. I think they can be addressed. But as much as I want to see the hobby do well, and grow again, and be in a healthy place, I think there's another problem any kind of next gen game would have to address- surviving it being extremely popular. There's definitely enough role-players out there, like just looking at a popular play-by-post forum I counted tens of millions of posts and they had around a hundred thousand users. An enjin website for guild wars 2 role-players had about 13,000 users. That's a niche community site for a single MMO that doesn't even officially support role-playing at all. What would happen if 10 percent of the population of either of those sites decided to give a single MU a try?
Right now, I think even one percent would probably overload most games. The unique things MUs really offer is hands on GMing to let players pursue their own stories in a collaborative environment with others, and I don't think any staff is big enough to handle a hundred new players showing up out of the blue. More to the point, there's not a whole lot of incentive for game runners to introduce new people to the hobby- their hands are generally full, and when it comes to telling the stories they find fun, they can only deal with so many people at once. So after a certain point they are either going to be sandboxes with increasingly distant staff, or games using heavy automation.
There's definitely worse problems to have, and I think most games could handle it if they have enough time and preparation. And overall, I actually think it's a good sign. I mean if there's hundreds of thousands of role-players out there on random sites that have never ever heard of MUs, and there very obviously is, then there's plenty of role-players. Just need to decide whether they want them or not.
We'll probably have a bit more play between the website (which isn't anywhere close to done) and the game itself as time goes on. Code-wise, since the website uses the same database as the game, it's easy and intuitive to have being logged into the website and being logged into the game mean pretty much the same thing, and update on one side automatically reflects upon the other. This lets us try some neat things, like character journals that can go in a searchable format, webs of character relationships, a timeline like history for characters so they can see their individual character milestones and how it relates to the ongoing development o the metaplot.
We'll probably push into beta when most of those story systems are done, the different organizations have more fleshed out coded means to gain and use their resources, and NPC agents controlled by players are more fully defined.
@Groth said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.
I very, very strongly agree. I'm generally finding that most things are way easier in a web format, and we do want to support that, absolutely. I'm not at all satisfied with the current implementation it's not intuitive and difficult to use, and the walk-through guide that I'm going to do will really just be a stop gap until it gets cleaned up.
One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.
That's something we've spent time talking about, and there's basically 4 different points that characters and organizations can accumulate things meaningfully and I think each has their own different approaches.
For Prestige, the social score, that's not really played up very much at present since we don't have the displays for it be near as visible as they will ultimately, but I imagine that'll eventually be a mini-game a lot of players enjoy. The trick there is we're going with percentage weekly decay, and flat+percentage losses on prestige hits, while only flat gains. So the idea there is as the base values increase higher they become increasingly unsustainable, and it'll tilt towards the players and organizations most invested in spending heavily to counteract decay and stay famous and dip away from anyone that loses interest. But at lower levels steady passive expenditures will keep increasing until they hit the point where the decay outpaces the flat gains.
I think of Dominion assets in a broad single category, since it'll cover holdings, the economic/social/military resources, influence level, agents, troops and so on. I think much like before there's two means to undercut the dinosaur effect, in that both most things are consumable in that they are consumed to yield a certain effect (which isn't reflected yet, but say social resources in order to influence a coded outcome), that acts as an incentive against hording or at least minimizes its impact. And secondly, to put a real cost on maintaining higher levels of growth which much like prestige acts as a push back against the highest tiers. But I think this particular point will become clear as we add in the systems where the points are spent, in that they aren't yet, and it'll probably be hard for characters to justify holding onto them versus the things they can do with them.
Similarly silver, I feel that the sinks are really where we counteract any gluts, and so far it looks good from that angle. I think we need to have several hundred times more capital income before the rare things would be considered commonplace, and that's ignoring them leaving the system through destruction/idled out removal. Still it's definitely something to watch, but I'm happy with it as long as it reinforces some feelings of scarcity that can drive RP.
Of the four, players would probably be most concerned about xp in the long term sense, since it's most relevant to their experiences from WoD games where huge dinosaur characters dominate everything. That's a very understandable concern. And I'm very open to catch up mechanics, and certainly have considered a few, though I'm not sure any are necessary just yet for a few mitigating reasons. I'm against lifetime xp carrying over vs unspent, since I think this tends to worsen the feeling of mass xp inflation, as it becomes more associated with stronger older players rather than just older characters, and is otherwise partly kept in checking with older characters being rostered/retired/etc. On one subtle but very distinct difference, xp totals and skills aren't as deterministic of character value in similar ways to systems like WoD, in that say in those systems every aspect of a character can be summarized with xp spends like in backgrounds. In Arx that doesn't really follow, in that a character with base stats/skills that happens to possess extreme political power could be overwhelming in the impact they have on the play environment compared to a commoner that has the greatest combat stats on the grid. That's the reason we give such a large xp bonus to creation of lower social ranks, in that it's disproportionate how characters in royal/noble social ranks have influence, and I'd rather counterbalance that with higher skills that make commoner characters much more effective specialists at their areas of expertise. That said, it definitely is a concern, and yeah I could definitely see us scaling starting xp in response if the average creeps too much, but I think 'too high' is a much higher baseline than in WoD by comparison so it might take a while for it to feel as similarly impactful/overwhelming to the play environment.
Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.
Oh I greatly appreciate that, and Tehom would for sure. It might be a little bit before we can enlist anyone, since almost all changes happening right now are backend that would make frontend changes a bit confusing (just about everything is being done in bootstrap off django, jquery, etc). Tehom will probably start asking for help when it gets closer to the point of others being able to pitch in.
@Griatch I've seen two definitions, the one you've quoted and this other one- "a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen." Which would mean text games are not considered video games, since there's no imagery to manipulate.
I think that one is more what most people on the thread are thinking of, since if you go by the video device one, that kind of invites in things that could be played independent of video devices, like say, two friends playing cards against humanity over skype would be a video game by that definition, since they would be playing a game over a video device, or two friends joking around by texts could be considered of video games. I think most people think of the visual medium with imagery to manipulate as intrinsic to the game.
@Arkandel I definitely agree, I'll probably write up tonight a rough and dirty guideline for PRP type storytelling in alpha and beta until we get the code support for it, but the very short version will be as long as someone runs a story by me so I can check it for thematic consistency, it's fine. Since there's a ton of hidden elements that could contradict what people find to be intuitive from a storytelling perspective, I'd just want to sign off on it until more becomes clear, and for now anyone could just shoot me a page on Apostate as the easiest thing, or a request. It'll be much, much more clean once we get the systems coded, but that'll hold true for just about everything.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
What is the mechanics behind a +job? You make a post only the ST can see specifying the tools/skills/etc they want to use, and the ST then eventually gets back to you with a result? To get a feel for it, is this more structured than, say, a message board with private sections?
Again explaining it through actual use, but a +job in this context is essentially a single thread into which anyone tagged can post messages and send rolls into.
In this case I as the Storyteller would first start the thread by giving it a title ("Orc attack investigation") and an initial text ("Hey guys, this is for your investigating needs, tell me what you'll be doing"). Then I CCing my group's characters into it and they can start posting things in there ("Alright, so I'll contact the Mayor and ask if the Orcs ever troubled the village before"), etc - stuff that wouldn't necessarily be good enough to run an entire scene for. If needed I can ask players to make rolls into the +job ("roll empathy to see if the Mayor is lying").
I see, so this moves the game from (semi-) real time on-grid to a more abstract GM-Player like thing. Potentially Play-by-post almost, since it can be managed without ST and player being online at the same time.
It's important for this to be something players can do on their own without having to bug staff about it, including to close or leave the +job if it no longer applies to them.
I can certainly see the point of that, yes.
This part of the thread has been very useful for me, since it reminded me a few use cases that I missed. And I don't think @griatch is off the mark here, in thinking that (from a MUD perspective) that it is more like a play-by-post. It wouldn't sound quite right to most MUSHers, since play-by-post is such a different format normally, but handling any kind of off-screen details and furthering story that way is pretty rare outside of MUSHes from what I've seen. While for our games I'd say it's pretty vital that characters have a degree of abstract control over what happens during downtime or offscreen, and stories continue to be developed in between RP scenes.
Now for Arx, a large concern was that it was easy for 'here's what my characters want to find out off-screen' could quickly become overwhelming, so we made an +investigations system in order to gate and automate the process. Characters put in a long description of things they are trying to find out and how they are going about it, and then this is all handled in an abstract way off-screen and during downtime which is why it draws play-by-post comparisons. And it's a string search for keywords of the topics, and searches for random potential pre-built string results of findings, and then rolls a combination of character stats/skills to determine what string they should get as a result- a clear success with metaplot information, a red herring that's misleading, just a failure, partial progress, etc. And as players ask questions we hadn't considered, we just add more strings of results to allow for easy duplication for the next player trying to find out the same thing. It still requires a lot of GM review, just because it would be easy to have keywords that don't really make sense for some of the results (and using djago's icontain's model could make partial matches that go way way off, so it would need a much smarter search), and GMs have to be ready to jump in and redirect things, but it handles a lot of the problems of GMs potentially being overwhelmed by gating the amount of questions players can reasonably investigate and automating a great deal.
Now as @Arkandel started discussing +jobs I realized this wouldn't really cover the different use cases for players (without staff permissions) running plots, for a lot of reasons. There's so much staff-only information in there that I don't know if I could make lock type permissions robust enough that would really cover all the cases of a player not seeing something they shouldn't by accident if we would give players access to it. So instead I'd have to be able to bump things down to a player running stories, and probably create something more like what he's familiar with, with a staffer looking at an investigation and going, 'Oh yeah this is for @Arkandel's plot, sending it down to him' and creating a thread for it that could still have dice rolls and automated results in it.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
This sounds very interesting in principle. I can see the overall gist of using a version control paradigm but I have a harder time seeing how to efficiently break up a plotline in a way to make it easy for players to branch and merge without a lot of manual management. Could you give some example of how this could work, in practice?
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Griatch
Right now things are so sandbox-y imo since the lack of tools heavily contribute to an environment that makes it extremely difficult for any individual storyrunner, even staff, to tell what other people have done/are doing in most mushes. It's largely relying on the memory of players and staff as they become aware of plot elements that might contradict previous things, and (this is a little outside my experiences so correct me if I'm wrong), probably creates hard feelings as someone runs a plot and then is retconned later after the fact by a staff member that suddenly realizes it contradicts something else. So for examples:
Currently- someone wants to run a plot that happens, as a side note, to include interaction with the chief of police of their sleepy town in Maine. It's revealed during the player run plot that the chief's a supernatural creature. Plot goes on for a month or two, and then second hand another player hears about the plot and mentions he ran a plot a few months ago that also mentioned the chief of police, but as a mortal hunter of the supernatural. Staff realizes it and tells group A that it no longer works, and it's retconned in progress to the annoyance of all involved. There's a lot of suggestions like, 'keep the amount of storytellers small' specifically because the games are basically reliant on everyone just to remember what happened and talk to each other for clarification, without really anything to refer to.
What I'd propose- a web form that has list of all story plots that have happened and are on going, searchable and collapse-able, with very brief summaries (maybe a couple sentences), but more importantly discrete plot categories. In the previous example, someone filling a web form for their proposed plot would plug in 'police' as a category along with vampires, some crime family, and any other story element categories. They could click an element, bringing up a list of previous plots involving it, and examining the elements would show that a plot six months ago has a note of, 'Police: Chief of Police's secret identity', letting them know there is a potential conflict, and alerting staff briefly overviewing plots for approval that there is a potential conflict.
So in comparison to a version control paradigm, it's extremely useful for players and staff to be able to tell what story elements are currently in play and present conflicts when being modified as a branch of the overall story. It would still need a lot of manual management, but in going back to the version control paradigm the current situation is more everyone doing their own thing in the dark and just hoping it works out.
@Kanye-Qwest Someone needs to be Dickwolf Exposition Guy.
@Tempest Yeah before it was definitely disproportionate, and it was more like a popularity contest, and I wanted something that felt a little more immersive in the sense that it represented player actions. I still don't think it's quite there though, and Tehom and I were working on something else that's a lot closer to what @Pyrephox was talking about that'll be an extension of the system. Since right now it shows a way people can generate resources, but we'll have something parallel to show how players can work together, invest on something together, and utilize their skills/stats as leaders to produce a game effect as projects. Which frankly isn't that much different that what really would be happening in requests in most games but a little bit more streamlined and easier, hopefully.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
- A GMing system for players creating PRPs, that would temporarily grant GM, staff like powers and code support.
- Full social combat systems.
Could you give some more details on those two items please? No need to go into the coded parts if they're just not fully fleshed out or designed yet, but I'm curious about your policies regarding them - i.e. how they'll be handled once the systems are in place.
If you can include an example that'd be great.
Lemme talk a bit about #4, since PRPs in code heavy games are kind of tricky, in that you run into issues with concrete elements that need GM support that would normally be handwaved in MUSHes, and really needs to have PRP runners have code to keep things immersive and exactly what you'd expect.
Like a PRP in a normal MUSH, while it varies a lot we know the general idea- a player gives staff a heads up for approval or not, depending on the game, it's checked for consistency, then everything falls upon the player running the plot and depending on how it resolves, sheets are updated and so on. There's not really hard code in so much, since everyone ultimately has the tools to do what they need.
But for a game like Arx, when there's automated combat, NPCs are attackable objects, currency and items are in game objects, there's three issues at play I think.
First, there's total handwaving, where players are able to @emit and do whatever they want, but they don't have the ability to create objects that would be consistent with the story- finding a dragon's horde can't happen unless they'd get staff to swing by and create the actual money, items, whatever to actually demonstrate that, which leaves players in this unfortunate position of @emiting and getting people to play along, but unable to create any kind of consequences that aren't handwaved unless they have the code support to go along with that and enforce consequences. That's just a big part of the whole MUSH/RPI type divide of consequences (good or bad) being kept by code rather than by hand. So until there's code support, or staff wanting to sit in and create objects/update things accordingly for a plot, it is stuck in this handwave-y state. That's where it currently would be until I get code support.
So then there's full coded support for players, that would in effect temporarily turn them into staff, and give them access to the coded abilities they'd need to make the RP consequential in the sense of demonstrable, lasting change at a glance to outsiders that aren't involved in the plot. The tricky part there is doing it in a way that doesn't have abuse cases, where if you are trusting players to act as staff even for just a single plot, what kind of oversight is involved. My feeling there is just an increasing degree of leeway granted to GMs based on feedback from players. For example, unless staff wants to risk messy retcons and constant oversight, probably shouldn't give a new guy the ability to shatter the grid and get carried away on his first try. Or similarly, the ability to bankrupt a great house or give something worth millions or arbitrarily kill players or so on. So this would be inherent limitations on the commands a player acting as a GM would have access to, and then just gradually removing the limitations as a GM goes.
And then there's the whole, 'well, how do we keep stories consistent and accessible and avoid a sandbox feel where everything happens in isolation and has no impact on other people?' My feeling there is something very akin to version control as a tool to help GMs figure out what plot elements are currently in play and being changed, to prevent any GMs contradicting one another and making those weird continuity breaks that happen in some games, particularly larger ones. For example, a player in house Grayson wants to run a tinyplot about Iron Guard elements that have gone rogue and are working with Abandoned to raid pilgrims traveling to Arx, and have been murdering Knights of Solace trying to escort the pilgrims. This would highlight different plot elements as a searchable index so anyone making a plot would know story is happening there- Grayson, Iron Guard, Abandoned, Pilgrims, Knights of Solace. Probably with a synopsis of each plot searchable in a database, then automatic sorting of different plot elements, so later if some dude is doing a story about Iron Guards purging disloyal elements, they'd see that previous plot highlighted and pop up and let them know what happened there, so they wouldn't trip over their feet and make anything contradictory. This also would let staff very quickly review proposed PRPs and see, 'this isn't possible because X happened' or 'This fits neatly along with Y, and will create potential story crossovers'. That kinda thing. While this sounds complicated, I think this would actually be much much easier to implement than the previous thing of giving players carefully controlled code, and probably would not be so bad, and it would come down to implementation being clear and easy to use, and not something that felt like an administrative pain in the ass.
Social combat I'll post more about later, there's a lot of debate about that, but the one thing I can say I'd never ever do is put in a system that made someone feel like they were obligated to RP with a creeper. That way leads to horror.
@Lotherio I personally think the most important ones to outline are ones that there's disagreement on, or can vary significantly from game to game, which can describe the atmosphere and culture you wanna foster. If you don't want a PvP game or you find it fun, it's a good idea to decide which and point it out. If you are okay with underage characters or it makes you uncomfortable, same thing. Do you want carefully moderated talks and civility, or free wheeling arguments and complete transparency. And so on.
If something can be argued either way and it is not defined, then people will act towards whatever way on an issue they fall upon, and just naturally expect most people will be on the same page.
@Arkandel I generally agree but I think everyone judges the relative merits versus what's possible from abuse cases. I don't think anyone would argue that giving everyone full admin privs on every game would be a great idea, even though it would definitely cut down on overhead. I think most players are honest, non-dicks. I also think most people get extremely involved in their stories, and the time they are least likely to be reasonable is when they get emotionally invested in a conflict against another player or feel slighted by something, and it's not that paranoid to try to avoid cases that get people worked up. For me, the cases that worry me the most are ones where it would be largely invisible to staff and extremely difficult to correct, resulting in a corrosive atmosphere for the game. Pretty much any system players feel justified in policing one another will result in players hating the fuck out of one another, imo.
@WTFE said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Yes, arguing with players can be a huge red flag. But let's also not forget how many games croak run by super sweet and nice people.
Bro you are literally the person that posted saying requiring email validation is moronic on a forum that requires email validation to register to post.
@lordbelh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
If I've noticed something, it is the amusing irony of all the silver of all the orgs in the game seem to be flowing into the crafters. These commoners who are making bank beyond any noble. Since there's no actual competition or pressures on them, or costs, they're probably gonna own everything soon.
I was concerned about that myself when designing the system but I think the sinks are working better than the perception of it might be. There's one commoner in the top 60 or so for money (at around 40th), and no others in the top one hundred, though one low silver character that has done basically all the tasks ever and is sitting with more economic resources than anyone. But neither of the two outliers has bought anything, and it's important to remember that most of the money spent is deleted, not transferred.
@Ominous It actually -does- work that way. To date, no one has combined them to get a 'revelation', the second tier up. For clarity, that's how the difficulty numbers work, in the same category they combine for an aggregate where if you pass a threshold you get a big thing for the category. Three tiers total, though it's designed to have mini tiers if necessary.
@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Glitch True, but the system could do much more. I honestly think it can do what Tasks does, only better. Right now, it feels a bit more of a 'I am investigating this', roll, get result, wait another week to investigate again. Letting the dice mechanics provide little RP hooks would be fantastic. It could be extended to requiring certain missions (GM-ed plots) or even use the task system, only instead of giving resources it gives a new clue.
Agreed, 100%. And this is very much intended. Keep in mind, we definitely don't see them as finished systems. A goal of beta is, 'Put in a basic, workable model. See how it goes while adding in next basic, workable model for core missing systems' and then continually refine before we go live. So I see investigation right now as that, its most basic form, and a lot more layers of complexity and RP incentives should come as time goes on, though it probably won't be revisited until at least after Dominion and Dynamic Exploration. Just no harm in discussing ideal, 'This is what I'd like to see' until then.
@Thenomain While that's kind to me, the game would be nothing without the rest of staff I have absolute and total faith in. Hellfrog in particular has an incredible talent for cultivating the kind of atmosphere that the game is being praised for- that is far, far more her work than mine. While you've had your problems with her, anyone that has spent time with her sees her immense talent in this way, and why the game has such a healthy and vibrant community, and moreover why I have complete faith in her maintaining that.
