Best posts made by Arkandel

@JinShei Do you want your slippers chewed up? Because that's how you get your slippers chewed up.

@Ghost Could you guys take this argument off the thread please? It's supposed to be constructive.

I yell at my team when they come to work sick. Sure, I love them spreading the love so that instead of that one person being unable to function in a couple of days I'm down several more.

@Ghost said:

@Arkandel will do. I am trying to be constructive

Thanks, I appreciate that.

I honestly don't mind disagreements - I wouldn't be on MSB if I expected a place where everyone agrees with me. Y'all are allowed to be wrong. What I mind is infertile discussions as that kind of does rub me the wrong way, and I don't consider my skin to be that thin.

When a thread like this essentially says 'hey, we've been doing things one way for a while, is there a different approach maybe that could work to improve things?' and some responses come down to 'no, we are all horrible people barely kept in check by the iron fist of empowered dictators who'll smack us back in line if we don't toe it and we'll turn on each other the moment that stops happening' it's... disheartening. Not because I think that's the case - I don't - but because that makes me wonder what their own view of the hobby is. If it's that bleak what are they doing here? If they're that burned out... why?

I've burned out before on games or even on MU*ing. I left until I felt more like it. I don't recall going around those games' forums telling people how much everything sucks - it's like WoW where some folks keep popping up to tell everyone else how horrible it is. Why are you paying a subscription then, dude?

<shrugs>

In my opinion the only way we can sort of get rid of this is to make consent requirements more universal.

In other words, I'd go with @Misadventure's addendum from earlier in the thread; if you want to really address this issue, make player to player collaboration mandatory. I didn't want to bundle this in though because if people object to open CGen they'll like a weighed/tiered consent-based system even less.

It'd stand a chance to get the job done though. At a cost, as with everything else.

@nyctophiliac said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

If my sister in law doesnt lay off the nagging I will batman into her room and pee on her bed. That is all.

I read that issue as well! I think that was Jean-Paul Valley though.

It's not consent which allows the worst of these offenders to create horror stories the rest of us repeat here afterwards and go 'whyyy was this allowed?'.

I can tell you why it was allowed if you want, @Ghost. And what the most major reason it doesn't get reported is. I didn't really want to because it might derail the thread - but it's got nothing to do with what administrative system the game is using or what its goals are.

@Ghost IT is different. I interview (and hire) TechOps on a regular basis, and their education or certifications can simply get people the interview. That's it, they get to walk in.

After that it'll be all based on how they can answer technical questions, how they troubleshoot problems, if they can effectively communicate different approaches and overall show they can respond to real situations our teams face on a regular basis.

But that approach definitely doesn't fit every field.

@faraday said:

@Arkandel I think your goals have too much methodology built in, and that's what people are objecting to.

That's a fair point. And there is overlap in there.

• "Audit don't approve" is a big turn-off for me. All games have an unspoken rule that totally crazy things will be retconned, but saying it like this makes it sound like "we have limits but we're not going to tell you what they are until after you exceed them." That's going to make me very leery of running plots for fear of retcon.

The idea there is simple. The vast majority plots are fine, staff should only intervene if someone fucked up big time. So unless we compromise the principle of removing bottlenecks by letting players do their thing and only stepping in if absolutely needed, how would you ensure things which are quite out-there or unwanted don't become part of canon?

For example yes, your concern would be perhaps valid if staff has been known to be trigger happy about their audits, but it doesn't strike me as likely that trigger-happy staff would pick this philosophy to run their game under. And while there can be a more or less comprehensive list of Things To Not Do on the wiki ('don't burn down the entire city in your plot',) it's unlikely every single really out-there idea could be preemptively mentioned.

I don't think it's fair to say I'm being closed minded about this (which doesn't mean I'm not, naturally I wouldn't think that's the case ), but I like the idea of having control mechanisms in place meant to be used rarely to prevent extreme cases. As noted in the initial pitch, trust should go both ways; players are trusted, but so are staff. In a way that's the only way any game can truly function well. So if staff has to step in once in a blue moon to find a compromise the players involved should give them the benefit of a doubt and communicate to figure it out.

• Having "yes first" as a staff mantra to encourage staff to be open-minded and allow players to steer the game is not so bad. Advertising a game a "yes first" opens yourself up to all kinds of bizarro player expectations and entitlement issues, as others have already said.

It does. But nothing is free in design. You pay something here to buy something there. What has to be decided is if the tradeoff is positive.

I'm not saying my ways are perfect. Every system has pros and cons. I'm just saying that clarifying your actual goals may allow you to consider alternative methods.

See above - I'm agreeing with you on much of this. I certainly don't think the proposed system is anywhere near ready - that's why I brought it to a peer review. I don't mind things being shot down as long as we try to build them back up afterwards.

@Ghost Yeah, my Indian interviews have typically gone very poorly. Not that NA candidates don't lie out of their teeth in their resumes because they do, and it's often because they just dragged widgets on a GUI which was using Jenkins/Ansible behind the scenes... yet that doesn't teach them either.

The issue I've had with Indian candidates is that they tend to be trained to be extremely specialized. My most extreme example is one candidate who seemed to only know what to do with mounting file systems and configuring fstab. That's it. No matter what I'd ask her to troubleshoot her go-to was to check fstab and/or restart the system.

You're welcome.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Thanks @mietze for looking after this, I'll do some cleaning up too.

@Jaded I thought Sirtis died when I read it.

@surreality said in Random funny:

@Cobaltasaurus said in Random funny:

@Arkandel out of curiosity did it work when I reported it? Cause I saw it and went "wtf" but he was still around for a day.

Ditto this. I saw the 'hide things people' go up after that iirc, but that one never ended up behind a tag despite it being the one I think I clicked.

As @Auspice said, when you flag something nodeBB doesn't pop up a notification for... some reason. So unless we manually check for flagged posts we don't see them.

I try to do that often but... life.

@Apos - it depends. For starters it's fairly rare (in my experience at least) for someone to be told directly 'hey, you're not good enough for me'. That's probably because it actually makes whoever goes ahead and say it sound like a total douche. What is being done instead is that such a person is merely passively avoided - which on its own isn't that bad, right? I mean theoretically that'd let that iffy roleplayer either find no scenes and move on thinking this game is dead/cliquish/whatever - we're very good at being blind to our own faults around here after all. Isn't that better since there are no hurt feelings?

Yeah, nope.

The problem here is when you're being 'passively avoided' - say, you asked on a channel and no one said anything - you don't necessarily know what the problem is! Is it you? Are people avoiding you or are they just busy? Or AFK? Or maybe it's your specific character concept which isn't that popular and if you just rolled something else it'd be fine? Or is it that they don't like you as a player despite or regardless of your roleplaying skill? Is it something you said taken the wrong way? Maybe someone's badmouthing you behind your back?

But you won't find out because there is no one specifically you can confront and ask what the reason was they didn't respond when you offered RP and they didn't answer.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/american-gods-actor-orlando-jones-184944412.html

It's one of those things that will either die without a whimper or will cause a huge uproar.

@Roz Ugh, don't even get me started about trying too hard to grab attention.

Have you met the guy who gets into scenes with no shits given about what's already happening in them? Like, he marches in and shoots out a massive multi-paragraph entrance pose where he just tries to take over the entire thing?

Oh, or the sphere channel people who spend thirty minutes circle-jerking each other about how awesome that scene they had last time was and how fantastically intriguing their characters are. When they write their novel they'll definitely put that PC in there (this is no made-up example either) because that's how special he/she is.

I don't have a huge list of peeves when it comes to roleplaying but attention whoring irks me.