Best posts made by Arkandel

@Sunny said in Pokemon Go:

It's actually ridiculously low on the data usage compared to what I'd have expected.

Yeah, compared to Ingress it's ridiculously low on data.

Also: My gym has a gym! Yay!

@L-B-Heuschkel A classic issue (and in some cases, 'issue') is what players can 'get' from a player-ran PrP.

For example your group infiltrates the vampire terrorist group and slays them! Yay! But their semi-automatic weapons are now among their ashes. Can the PCs claim them?

Many staff teams try to regulate this very clearly, and even with the best intentions, yet it often results in creating wiki pages with a zillion rules trying to predict every possible scenario ahead of time. That often makes it... challenging (and hostile looking) to use.

It can end up looking very much like staff does not want you to run a plot that has any impact at all, rather than just trying to make it fair and clear for everyone.

@tinuviel said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

Folks appear to have deduced the source of the initial misinformation that caused the behaviour that is being apologised for and have expressed their displeasure.

ETA: ELI5: Person got told things. Person did bad. Person said sorry. Other people found out who told person wrong things. Other people hate wrong-thing-teller now.

Emphasis mine. I trust you can see why I might be confused if that's the level of clarity here, right?

But let me read my PMs.

@Haven Oh sorry. I'll send a dick pic too then as is tradition.

Ugh that poster. It hurts. Make it stop hurting.

@sincerely No. Be Arkandel or why bother, really?

It's what I do.

@ThatGuyThere said in Pokemon Go:

For example I have lied for decades to the check out people at various stores when they ask for an e-mail address. (My answer always is I don't have one, when I actually do but that is the most polite way to dodge giving it to them.)

Why is 'no' impolite?

The minimum wage cashier doesn't care whether they get your e-mail address or not. I see the shortcut, but it's good to send the correct message ('it's none of your corporation's business to be able to contact me outside of this routine transaction') than the wrong one ('it's just that not everyone has an e-mail address').

@chibichibi said in Golden Road Pivoting to Contagion Chronicles:

So I don't think a lone Mage 2E game was really going to be a hit.

In my opinion a lone Mage 2E game has a much better chance of working than a mixed-sphere one.

The reason for that is Mages tend to outshine other splats, and their thematic affairs tend to take over everyone else's, but you can make a robust setting based on just them.

Would that be a 'hit' ? I don't know what your definition of the term is in this context so I can't tell. But it can absolutely be fun, I think.

@surreality said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

For the most part, it looks like a lot of 'I like you just fine, but I don't want to <thing> with you.'

The way I mean it is this.

Me: "Hey Surreality, we're currently having fun hanging out/playing PCs in a coterie. Let me run a story in which I kill your alt and eat her."

You: "We do have fun, but I'm not into being canibalized!"

Me: "I'd like you more if you were!"

That's the gist of it, in my opinion of course. I.e. it's not about pushing your boundaries slightly (which you already covered) or seeing if you'd try something you don't often do just in case you end up having a good time if only because you're doing it with me, your buddy. No, it's about trying to push you into doing something you already 100% know you don't want to do at all, no matter the company.

It's not about who you're doing it with but who you are, and my best argument - my only one, really - can be summed down to this: "But I'd like you more if you were someone else".

All the other stuff, the quid pro quo, the 'look at it this way', the attempts to reframe it into "it's just IC" or trying to make it sound like it's all about you being a good sport or a better player or... whatever... it's all obfuscating that one request. Sure, I like you now, but I could like you more if you were into things you're not into. C'mon. It'll be fun (for me).

@dontpanda I suppose it's because both are important, but we can do more about smaller - but still important - things around us than much more critical things halfway across the globe.

For example when I first moved to Canada the concerns here over how animals are treated seemed less warranted than in southern Europe; sure, people don't always spay their pets so that many end up having to be euthanized in shelters to make room for others but compared to having thousands of strays around with literally no one looking after them, often starving to death or getting hit by cars it's a lesser problem, right? ... but not so to that little mutt in the shelter right now. The one I can go adopt right now and whose life literally save - I can't do anything about thousands of others across the ocean but I can rescue this one.

The same thing applies to all kinds of human rights violations. Obviously in the western world things are better but they weren't always better; people had to struggle, fight and not give up to bring them to the point they are now. It's not like because we generally treat each other better than throwing them off roofs it's time to say 'mission accomplished' and sit back - we're still shitty people and we'll do shitty things if left to our own devices or stop being outraged by the fact.

The scale might change but the shit still smells the same, you know what I mean?

@mietze said in Player Omsbudsman?:

But again, I think if your whole current staff is so incapable of this that you need to bring in another person exclusively for that, I think that it is unlikely to succeed because one person is not going to be enough.

Also why not just use the more competent person handling the communication anyway be staff and cut out the middleman?

< wanders around aimlessly, walks into walls >

I just don't see the problem with saying 'no' politely. Cashiers over here routinely ask if I'd like to donate money to $corporateCause which is just there to give the company a better tax break and I automatically decline. It's not a big deal at all, it's not like the person behind the counter cares... they are just obligated to ask.

@derp Developers in general tend to be very picky and territorial about their preferences. Vim versus emacs, tabs versus spaces, take your pick.

Ultimately as long as a language works for the intended purpose it doesn't really matter too much. Most modern languages are interchangeable to a large degree, and it comes down to what you're already familiar with or just what you like.

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

I don't think your question relates to what Groth said.

I think it's relevant to one of the points of what he said (or, at least, how I interpreted them). Yes, I agree for example if there's a best way to create a certain type of character, yet the game doesn't instruct you in how to do so, or at least point out the tradeoffs if you choose to build them a different way, that's an issue.

However:

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

You'll never be able to create a system where knowledge and optimization are not things. However you can create a system where a player just making their sheet according to what they feel their character should be like will be succesful and not be subjected to pressures about doing things 'wrong'.

Of course not, unless characters are virtually identical to each other in the end. However my question wasn't so much about whether it's possible to do so or not, but rather what the upside of it was.

For example there are players who enjoy crafting a character's sheet, spending carefully to create a specific build to back their RP up. I'm one of them. And yet even professionally created and highly curated systems (MMOs come to mind) have historically failed to achieve the dual state of balance and *absence of homogeneity. That's a really, really tough goal to achieve.

What's the upside in trying in the context of a game like Arx? It's not a rhetorical question, I think it's a valid one.

"The Guardian is reporting that Apple will "rake in $3 billion in revenue from Pokemon Go in the next one to two years as gamers buy 'PokeCoins' from its app store, according to analysts." One pack of 100 PokeCoins costs about $1 in Apple's app store, but gamers can purchase as many as 14,500 PokeCoins for about $100."

Daaaaaaaaamn.

@krmbm said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

For me personally, it's because I'm not a 19-year-old who can stay up all night long reading help files and learning to <snip!>

It's probably out of this thread's scope but that's one of the main causes professional developers eventually divert from their original career paths. In your 20s you can afford to enthusiastically stay up night after night wrestling with the cool new technologies, learning them inside and out and coding cool shit to hone your craft. In your 30s and 40s, with kids and a family, obligations, not to mention a body/mind that just can't handle going to sleep at 03:00 and getting up at 08:00 any more, it's a different story.

But having seen that from the other side it's not bad either way. Project managers (or managers in general) with strong technical skills get paid well. And veteran developers who might not be intimately familiar with every newfangled new toy but with a firm grasp on the fundamentals, able to architect and troubleshoot are always in demand, too.

As the title says I'm looking to see if we can get a better insight on what makes someone a roleplayer, and perhaps a MUSHer. It's not so much anecdotes about how we started in this hobby that I'm curious about (although feel free, by all means) but rather what about us other than the mere circumstance of someone in our lives going "hey, there's this kinda game you might like..." conspired to turn us into the hobby.

For example many people are gamers, but they don't play MUSHes. Many enjoy books and games, but... same thing. I'd bet there are lots of folks who like books, games and like to write but they aren't interested in roleplaying per se. Lots of friends I know who enjoy table-top games have been completely uninterested in MUSHes even though they already knew a lot about RPG systems, mechanics, etc.

So why are we here and others are not? What's the recipe that creates a MUSHer? What are the - shall we say rare? - ingredients that got us into this messbeautiful hobby?

When she was a teenager my sister went to church wearing jeans. Not ripped jeans, not short jeans... just jeans. The old priest there disapproves of that non-skirt shit young ladies had been wearing on their way to hell and he made a point of berating her for it in front of the congregation.

As a direct result of it she basically said fuck it and never went back to church. Who gained from that idiocy other than a cranky old fool's self satisfaction for a few moments?

It's hard to tell the institution apart from its representatives, so all it takes is one incident like that to paint a permanent picture.

@wizz Yeah +help versus help used to be the bane of my life. Especially for 'custom' commands like +aspirations or whatever.