Best posts made by Arkandel

@tragedyjones <fistshake>

I actually am not so sure opening positions for which players may not be accepted until staff finds the exact thing they're looking for is a good idea.

Rejection never feels good so why invoke that negativity if you know in advance you'd only accept a very specific kind of player for it? Having to tell otherwise perfectly decent (if not great) players 'no' won't be pleasant for you or for them. It's better to simply be aware of the opening internally and open it to someone when they appear on your radar as good matches for it.

Basically, this isn't a good way to go at it; the intention is good but the result won't justify it. A player who's not allowed to play that advertised Elder and sees the position stay vacant for week before someone else fills it will feel they aren't valued very highly by staff on their own game instead of be thankful because the impression of equality was given, you know?

@Admiral said in Good TV:

The real question is how the series will handle the strong D/s and BDSM undertones that Robert Jordan had in his books.

(Which they'll likely remove, because that stuff always just felt a little... sleazy to me.)

Adjustments will be made anyway, there always are. A lot of the excess stuff will be sanitized, too - there's a very slim chance those Seanchan collars are making it the script the same way they were used in the books for starters.

My main question would be what will get dropped since there is a lot of plot-fat to trim there.

For example are they really going to have three separate romantic arcs for Rand? And how much time are they going to spend on exposition about how the One Power works? We're talking literally hundreds of pages' worth of material.

Hell, the cast was just released - where's Lan? Elayne? Min? Those were all characters in book 1.

@VulgarKitten said:

Basically, people will complain no matter what you do, so you might as well do what you personally prefer.

Yeah, that's a thing too.

@WildBaboons said in Good TV:

but maybe it'll inspire someone with the time to make a MUSH

<hope intensifies>

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

It's really all about consistency, if there's a game in a theme people like and no other choices. I will leave a game fun by total, fucking assholes, but a stunning amount of people won't, as long as the damn thing is up and running.

How do you explain Fallcoast/TR then? By all accounts it's a festering wound, but it's not the lack of alternatives which keeps it popular - no other theme offers more choice than the nWoD.

@Rinel I quite loved the paranoia of who is, or might be, a darkfriend - sometimes based on very minor clues, any bit of irregular behavior, that one thing someone said that one time, etc.

It seems a bit more common now that we've seen the same thing a bunch of times in the form of Skrulls, Cylons, etc... but I feel back then it was a brand new, cool concept: Paranoia in fantasy.

@Ganymede said:

Hold a second. I never said that I would only pick people I know and like for important roles. I said I would likely prefer them.

Speaking of fairness though, it's also a great deal more honest for staff to hand-pick people they think will do an important position justice than to open it to 'everyone' and only pick the ones they wish anyway.

If you need someone to play an Elder in your sphere then the call for who it will be is made by staff. Let's take a quick look through them to examine which the saner option from this list is (and please, if anyone has alternatives feel free to add them):

• Pick the best player from those applying, in your opinion.
• Exclude good players you know because you happen to know them, thus penalizing them for it.
• Randomize the selection. Roll the dice!
• Don't have an Elder at all.
• Have Elders played by staff.

The second and third options are silly. The forth penalizes the whole game in the name of fairness, which I think is a poor trade-off.

The last option has been used on some games. And yet on those the number complaints aren't eliminated, they are simply different ones. After all staff are often too busy to play with any consistency and the character's player is still being hand-picked, only instead of a 'staff friend' it's being given out to 'staff'. Just how that a significant improvement nepotism-wise is beyond me.

I see your Spider-man and I will raise you an official Matrix 4 announcement just because.

@Ganymede said:

Sometimes, the best staffers get a hold of spheres full of toxic people, get overwhelmed, and cannot get the situation unwound.

My experience is this is the product of higher-up staff handling the responsibility of running a sphere to someone but not the authority to sphere make changes there.

So they are essentially allowed just enough leeway to get in, spot the issues then summarily become frustrated enough to burn out or resign. Then the circle perpetuates.

FanExpo is so much fun! I've been here for a few hours already and I don't want to go yet (but I'm getting hungry).

Anyone else here today? Message me.

What I want is the freedom to run plot that I find fun (which usually means 'stories I'd have enjoyed if someone else had ran them') without being burdened with being staff.

I just don't particularly enjoy my PCs being a 'staff alt'. That's an unfun label.

So any game that lets me run my stuff - with reasonable supervision, I wouldn't ask or expect carte blanche - is what I prefer.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

@WildBaboons said in Good TV:

I was really hoping for Byron Mann after seeing him in Wu Assassin

Everyone hopes for Byron Mann after seeing him in Wu Assassin.

Unfortunately, you're more likely to get Ken Jeong.

Hrm, interesting choice for Lan. I don't care about the racial casting choices one way or the other but I admit I was thinking of him as older as well.

Speaking of all this though I'm curious now to see how much emphasis is placed on the martial arts parts in the show - sparring, training, fighting, all that stuff. It's probably much more cinematic than teaching about how Saidar is like a flower spreading its leaves or whatever but then again just how the One Power works is critical to what makes WoT tick.

I've been thinking about relaunching my web-MU project. So let's see:

1. A web-based interface supporting a 'grid' - i.e. multiple rooms players can pose in.

2. Permanent sheets per character with customizable stats and a way for admins to view and set them.

3. PMs between players.

If there's a tutorial supporting that for Evennia, @Griatch, then I could figure out the rest from there. I haven't coded in python in forever but it could be fun.

What's ... I would call it amusing but it's not at all, is that the same people who subscribe to Revenge For Cecil aren't vegetarians.

So they'll happily go gobble down pounds of meat harvested from less exciting animals systematically living their lives under truly horrible conditions and reward the people doing this by paying for that meat, but ohno that one lion.

They're the same people who'll rage about abortionist baby-killers but will then also rage about those no-good deadbeat single mothers who went and got themselves pregnant and now need aid so they can feed said baby.

@Coin said:

The best a game's staff can do is build something that is satisfying to everyone and that, at least in some way, manages to give everyone something resembling what they want.

I disagree.

A best staff can ever do is manage to have everyone dislike what they did about equally, or to have as many people like their implementation as much as possible then call it their intended demographic.

Staff that even tries to satisfy everyone will fail.

It: Chapter 2 was a'ight. Nothing special. The first one was much better - this one had a lot more comic relief that got distracting at times, and I think it over-relied on its physical gory horror effects.

Also the ending was about five minutes too long.

IMHO, no. Well, not at a significantly higher chance of success than before the new movie.

Basically MU* success as defined in terms of activity and popularity (there are other metrics but they're unquantifiable) is largely a matter of momentum; a large number of players create at once, thus generating things to do for each other. For that to exist a critical number of gamers must exist first for such activity to self-perpetuate.

By the time a new Star Wars MU* goes through the process of development, having a grid built, coded getting a wiki, tested etc it'll be weeks/months. By that time the movie will be relatively old news, at least for the purpose of thrilling players enough to attract them over.

None of these things means I wouldn't give it a try, though.

@Rinel You know what though... Arrow jumped off a cliff early but (in my humble opinion) so did Flash, and it didn't take as long.

I'm quite fine with some soap opera elements in superhero series like this but it just kills the pace to have 10-minute long scenes in which characters are doing nothing but declare their undying love for each other in every episode, especially with cheesy, predictable dialogue. That stuff gets really boring, really fast because of how repetitive it is.

The Felicity Smoak arcs killed Arrow for me since the entire series revolved around them. Then by season... I want to say S3 of Flash the same thing happened there, too, and I stopped watching.

@Darinelle said:

@Arkandel - and what about staffers who don't have PCs?

Those poor souls. Why?