Best posts made by Arkandel

Here's a concern/issue that I have.

All of this is fine. There are theories, different views and various parts in canon (from the movies, animated series, EU books, comics, etc) over the last 35-40 years about what the Force is and how it works. That's part of the fun, it's great.

What I'd like is for staff to give us a direction on just how they expect things to work in the context of that game. Are characters still playable if they fall to the Dark Side? What exactly are the social rules for Jedi - can they be trained later in life, are they permitted to marry? Are other Force-related factions available (as in, not essentially recreated by players who've read the books, but actual established communities and part of the theme)?

I think being transparent upfront about what is part of the thematic scope a game is going to incorporate - and what isn't - should be decided and broadcasted very clearly.

So, for a mild dose of necromancy I wanted to address this here:

@tempest said in Fixing United Heroes- Too bad we cannot talk about it on the game:

I would like to report @Ganymede for moving this thread and committing treachery most foul. She has let the nazis win.

@Arkandel, don't let this injustice stand!

I know you're half joking but to give a quick answer, which can cover others' concerns as well. Please keep in mind I'm tired, and my ideal evening does not include MSB. It's the time I can actually play games or watch some basketball on TV, so if it doesn't make sense I'll go over this again in the morning.

The concern here seems to be that if a thread is in the Hog Pit it's 'hidden' behind the opt-in wall, and thus invisible to casual viewers. That makes our system prone to being played by malevolent posters who want to hide their dirty laundry from those viewers.

However MSB isn't a court of public opinion. It's not wikileaks for MU*. That's one of the roles we serve, and I think we've done pretty damn well in that way for a long time, but it's not our goal. Its purpose is not, to coin a term I never agreed with but have often seen, there to 'shut down games'. Not only does it not have that power, it shouldn't.

MSB is here for the MU* community, all of it or as much as we can have, and not just for the popcorn-and-lolz masses hoping to see someone burn a bit more in the court of public opinion. There are those - there are many - who don't want to read massive flamewars, fuck-you memes and personal attacks; that's precisely what the Hog Pit is there to do, it's a compromise between the two crowds.

So to actually address your issue (generic 'you' now, since it's not just you voicing it), if you think a thread ought to stay out of the Hog Pit then don't turn it into a dumpster fire. It will stay out of there, then.

The poster we all know was a staff alt/friend from UH didn't foul the thread up. Sure, he/she stirred the pot, but I didn't see any particular foul language in there. We stooped to that level ourselves - we did that - and in doing so, the thread went away.

So can someone play us like that? Use the system to hide their dirty laundry? Yes - by design. And yes - if we allow them to. We don't have to. If this guy had started shouting profanities that novelty account would have been banned within minutes, believe me. So ... take some responsibility as well here, please. If you want a thread to stay out of the Hog Pit, don't make sure it ends up exactly there.

Now, having said aaaaall that.... someone pointed out to me we could have split the thread better. We could have not moved the entire thing but only select posts.

I think that's something we can improve on, yes. It's just a matter of every admin figuring out this forum's ins and outs, not to mention having the time to do so. So to address @Tempest's actual complaint, I back Gany 100% here - it was objectively the right call to make - but I'll also see that we all us admins get some practice using our vast powers for which you hate and fear us , since we could have split up the nasty parts of the thread and left the rest up for public consumption.

If you have thoughts to share please do so. I actually felt we had been doing something good here - there were two cases of games lately where staff abused its own players and protected themselves which we didn't allow it to happen. That is a healthy sign.

Thanks for reading. I'll catch up on y'all tomorrow, my Tauren paladin needs some new boots.

@chibichibi said in Brainstorming oWoD Games:

In this world, it's chaos. Not exactly post apocalyptic but chaos. The Technocracy and Traditions are in a huge fight trying to cover up all the crazy Marauders trying to bork with the reality while Nephandi are trying to make everything descend.

My initial advice is to ground your project's high-brow notions early on to its intended gameplay.

In other words this is what you want the game to be about, but what will PCs do on a day to day basis? How will this relate to them in practical terms?

Once you have the answer then it's time to ask another question; since you don't want a sandbox, what kind of resources (in terms of code and automation, player- or staff-STs, etc) will it take to support that vision?

@apos A difference that complicates manners between staffing a MUSH and doing whatever it is we do here is that there's no part of a game - typically - where by design is a more or less designated free-for-all territory. Imagine if there was a channel or room on Arx people could say nearly whatever they wanted, and to whoever, and freely traveled back and forth between it and the rest of the MU*. Things would probably spill out of there sooner or later if you weren't 100% on the ball, and worse, behaviors would carry over.

I am not a traditionalist but the Hog Pit seems vital to some of MSB's functions and I'm very reluctant to mess with that (despite, perhaps, appearances to the contrary). And yet one of my actual concerns about the forum is leaving small groups of people chase others out. In fact that's why I was convinced having some moderation was perhaps necessary which went against my initial inclinations.

For to give an example, the damage that a clique can do to a MUSH is in some ways limited; they would require outside - commonly staff - factors to work in their favor, they often have natural rival factions others can go to avoid them, even the nature of rooms themselves can let you avoid someone you can't be around. MSB offers none of those protections; if you can't stand me then I can be in your face every day anyway. If I have friends they can do the same. The recourse you have in those cases is pretty limited.

That's what's currently troubling me more than anything else when it comes to the forum. The rest are growing pains and adjustments we can make, both internally and culturally. But I don't want MSB to harbor systemic harassment, either.

It's one if not the main reason I was telling @faraday earlier in this thread I would really like it if we as a community can step in more often to regulate each others' tone, because the other options are that administrators need to do so, which can obviously go terribly wrong, or worse to scratch that up as a necessary evil.

@seraphim73 You'd also lose the building blocks of some really cool WoT elements. The Aiel, for starters, the tainted and/or newly restored male channelers making everyone around them feel uncomfortable, etc.

Anyway I'll wait to see if an the owner/coder combo show up in this thread (assuming they want my help, of course) else back to lurking. Realistically it'll take something like this to pull me back into MUing if anything can.

@kanye-qwest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Ok. What do you have to say about the civil statements I have made in this thread about the issue I brought up? Not threads being moved, or what the moderation should be, because I don't have any feelings about that. I mean specifically about a mod insulting people in the very thread asking for patience while what moderation should look like gets hammered out.

There have been several admissions of fault in this thread, by myself and by others. If you are not satisfied with those I don't know that I can help you much further. But you seem to be demanding @Auspice's head, and you won't get it.

I want to make this place better. Those are the things I have feelings about; when people say 'hey, maybe a forum in between what we know as Constructive and the Hog Pit' I like it, because it's a solution. It's something we can implement, set some rules aside, maybe give a try and see how it goes.

But you seem to have a crusade. I have no time for that.

@seraphim73 Remember the alternate WoT storyline we ran on Tyme for a while, with the Tai Sedai?

I think it was fairly successful in terms of buy-in, but it's hard for me to really judge that since I ran it. I wonder how that would work out as the core of a MU* metaplot for longer.

It's often not in your hands. In fact creating an interesting character (which for some people means someone with a rich background, specific thematic ties to complicated concepts, a quirky enough personality, etc) can make him a lot harder to play when on the grid.

For instance playing a survivor of vast supernatural phenomena, a veteran mystic who's seen too much, can easily make it bland to actually hit the grid and find not much is happening. Those aspects of his personality won't be easy to come out while mixing it up with the random ghoul from next door whose interests include pop music and Call of Duty.

My favorite characters have always been flukes. I started playing them and something clicked because of what other people I happened to run into who had room in their IC lives for mine, and I don't think I had poured more or less effort or creativity into them than others whose names I couldn't even remember any more. That's how how it works.

@derp I don't think this has anything to do with the guy's religion, whatever it is. He certainly doesn't go advocating RL world principles to anyone. He's probably influenced by his background or upbringing but who isn't?

It does have to do with... well, whether readers like that style of writing. There's nothing wrong with it. He's already one of my favorite authors; would I like it more if there was more chemistry between characters in certain ways? Yeah. Would I like him to focus a bit less on the 'magic systems' that he creates? Yes.

But is he really talented and, quite importantly in this day and age, does he actually produce new books on a regular basis without sacrificing their quality or making them all feel and read the same? Hell yes.

@wizz My issue isn't having the Hog Pit around or that people like a place they can get their fix.

The critical part is containing that sort of thing in there so it doesn't spill out into every other thread. We may need to slap a few wrists to make people behave like adults outside the Hog Pit, at least at first.

This is hilarious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Darkness

TL;DR: Dude 'translates' Dracula into Swedish in 1899. It takes people just about a century to realize he didn't translate it as much as... basically write a whole new fan-fiction version of it with more eroticism, less vampiric stuff, and some kinda social Darwinism commentary.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@Arkandel, I've noticed, has started a few abstract 'Discuss a Thing' style threads himself, and that's a good start, although some of them may also suffer from the abstractness. I am in favor of promoting this stuff but I'm not sure how we're going to do it. What can we do here? I'm willing to help!

That happens for two reasons:

1. I just... like discussing things (look at my thread history!). In fact I'm not greatly interested in discussing MSB in particular, as it feels pretty meta. I'd rather talk about plot design, characters or whatever else.

2. I think being abstract and not hyper-focused lets us think outside of the box sometimes. Not everything has a solution (let alone a resolution) but we can still improve even from dead-end ideas. For example as a result of people thinking about giving 'star' reviews for games here I've been looking at nodebb plugins (there's just one, and the documentation on it is pretty thin) that could pull it off; but just because it can't be done it doesn't mean it wasn't a great suggestion.

@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:

@arkandel Don't forget, legit Vanilla WoW servers!

Upright orcs, goddammit. At last. And potentially seeing cities we've been walking in for more than a decade fall into enemy hands will be awesome.

I need to figure out what race/class to play. Love'em druids but it's been an expansion and a half now, I'm due for a change... and I don't know if I will require the class to have a tank spec this time.

To disagree with @derp, and not because of the 80s angle...

It's a very long held myth that the setting itself, barring extreme examples ("we'll set this game in 1950s Iran") bears nearly as much importance to WoD as how it's executed. Again and again we've seen threads trying to nitpick which cities and exact timeframes, only for yet another generic sandbox-by-night variation to come out of the gates.

A robust political system - I've literally seen Vampire games where, for weeks after they were open, we had no idea which Clan the Prince was from, or what the IC power structure even was - and some sort of plan for what characters will be able to get into during their first couple of months is a lot more important than something like 'oh we'll set it in the 80s' other than cosmetically picking different hairdos or having Duran-Duran playing in your local bars.

@ortallus said in General Video Game Thread:

Okay, not QUITE how I meant it, but I see how it came across that way. Ew Ortallus. Just.. ew.

Wait, what if @Ortallus is Trump's account?

This could explain a lot!

@pyrephox said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

That said, if I did play a historical game, as a /player/ I'd want to see that reflected at least in the setting, if not in the PCs, or I want it explicitly excised from the setting.

I think my only caveat for historical games - unless, of course, it's explicitly stated they are going 'Holywood' with it, which is perfectly fine - is that nothing utterly implausible takes place. So if there's an Asian person in mid-1600s England they should be prepared to get stared at, that sort of thing.

But I don't doubt it's actually safer for staff to build their theme in a way that IC discrimination just doesn't become too much of a thing in different ways. Ultimately it's a tradeoff; does the MU* benefit more from the thematic inclusion of racism or sexism than it loses from potential jerk players ruining things for others?

@faraday Again with the anecdotal reply from me, but although I've encountered (of course) far fewer women than men in IT, on average they were noticeably better at their jobs.

I've given this some thought, and the explanation seems clear. It's not so much that magically female programmers, sysadmins etc are better than their male counterparts; it's simply that in order to make it in the field they need to be better than average or motivated enough to invest in themselves and push through.

@collective said in How do you construct your characters?:

Now, after a couple of days, I've got the character's 'voice' in my head.

I envy that. It takes me a few days after I start playing to get the voice down, and then even that's followed by a long, slow refinement.

Battle for Azeroth's quest lines and zone design are so well done. The production values are amazing, but at last we don't need to look at demon-green everywhere.

Some of these places are gorgeous to look at.

@thatguythere What you are describing definitely exists in gaming. The transitory nature which makes interaction past the point of 'well, we're playing right now' irrelevant, or even inefficient, is there; I join 5-man groups on WoW all the time, and I don't care who these other 4 people are. I look at their gear to make sure they can pull off the run, but they don't even have names to me; there's a DK tank. If I need to refer to him, that's how I do it: "Hey, tank, nice job!".

Yet in this hobby there are people I haven't played with in years I interact with regularly on MSB. Hell there are people who haven't played in years, period, but who might come back. What's even more important is they do - many of us, myself included, took years-long hiatus and returned, only to find they still had roots around and others remembered them.

That's how it is. In one game I don't even remember you while we're actually still playing, and in another you are a person to me, and I have memories of you.

Your reputation matters, too; that DK tank might be bad (I mean, he's a DK, come on) but it's not like if we group up the week after I'd recognize him. But here, look at our threads... we have long memories. Sometimes for the worse things we did but often for being cool, too. There are folks I'd play with in a second if our paths crossed again, and I'd make no secret of it when I introduced them to others.

I mean your perspective might differ, but I feel community isn't merely important, it's what's keeping me MU*ing.