It's a good idea to plug your username/e-mail into https://haveibeenpwned.com/ now and then to see if it was ever included in a breach.
It's a far better idea to never, ever reuse passwords for any accounts you care to keep, and even more so, which hold private information about your identity.
More so for games than for most accounts types, in fact.
@thatguythere said in Regarding administration on MSB:
If you mean the board as a whole, I am here to argue/chat/theorycraft about games. Posts in non-game threads are mostly asides because like most conversations topics wander around. I am on discussion boards about other topics that interest me as well such as pro wrestling, comic books, sports, and Big Brother (the reality tv show not the Orwellian idea) (Note I don't consider any of those place communities either)
No, that's what I meant. You are here over a long period of time arguing/debating games and other stuff with us. Stuff that interest us, and which interest you, and in the process you keep running into the same people over and over to do it. You might even remember some of us from past interactions with you - we do.
I hate to break this to you man, but whether you like it or not... you're part of what we call a 'community'. Welcome!
@ortallus said in EPIC vs Steam:
I just don't understand where this "I don't want to have multiple launchers" thing is coming from. I mean, I've got Steam, Blizzard, EPIC and Origin already, for various reasons, and had Bethesda up until the dumpster fire that was Bethesda's handling of Fallout 76 (for the record, I enjoyed the game immensely, but the issues that came up made me walk away from the title and the company entirely, for good).
If by 'launcher' you mean 'the thing that I run to start this one game' then I don't care. I can have multiples and it won't matter to me one bit.
If a launcher is supposed to guide me into an ecosystem of games then it does matter. A lot. Especially if those games use DRM specific to that ecosystem, with the worst case scenario here being of course that if the whole thing fails what happens to the games I bought? If I purchase a physical game from a DVD I can reinstall it in a couple of years, but if the store is AWOL what are my options going to be? Granted, this is still an issue with Steam but it's proven itself to be reliable and here to stay - can everything else say the same?
To give a counter-example I did buy into gog.com's take on this but it was because they offered two things no one else seemed to. One is that they offer truly DRM-less games - you buy it, you own it - and the other was that they allowed you to migrate specific titles from Steam to theirs, so in a way that 'unlocked' past purchases I had made. That was a competitive advantage, and since they gave me something no one else was putting on sale I paid up.
If other launchers can do the same then they, too, can have my money.
@ixokai said in SunnyJ's Anti-Sexual Harassment Guide:
I just want to say, in light of recent events:
Believe the women.
In most cases it's not even about believing anyone. It's just a matter of taking it seriously the first time around at face value, and acting on it. Simple as that.
In the vast majority of cases the person feeling wronged doesn't first go to staff after shit is already unbearable; they go over with something fairly mild. Maybe someone's been making borderline comments in the OOC room, or is getting a little spammy over pages. Hell, sometimes it's not quite phrased as a complaint per se, but it's more of an FYI thing.
When that happens the correct response by staff is to treat the person coming to them with respect; at that point it doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, if they are victims or just maybe misunderstood a humorous comment or... anything. All that matters is that are upset, and they should never walk away from that contact feeling that they were ignored, or - worse! - that their reaching out was unwelcome.
No matter what comes next, regardless of any other factors, if you are staff and you allow your players to read between the lines that you'd rather they hadn't come to you, you've already failed.
It's not until after this encounter that staff get to actually evaluate the case, gather any further information they feel is necessary and take action as appropriate. But that first step is crucial.
(sorrynotsorry for being off topic)
If anyone's looking for a tank or healer for mythic+ in normal WoW I'm game for regular groupmates.
My Warder on a Moment on Tyme. I played him for something like... four years? That's an insane amount of time for someone like me who doesn't have alts, so that fact alone makes him my favorite.
It was also because when he started out I barely knew how to roleplay at all, let alone do so online, so as the character grew so did I; he started from scratch (an unguilded nobody) who became a trainee, went through the paces, became a Warder, then rose to instructor... and as much as I hate the style of gaming back then - forcing everyone to follow a strict syllabus and going through processes that took a very, very long RL time to earn things, it did mean more at the end.
In retrospect the character himself was only mildly interesting. He was a healer turned into a killing machine, so that part was fun to play out, and the moral choices he had to make on the way did give me some memorable scenes, but I can definitely look back and see he was too good at too much; these days I wouldn't play that kind of concept, at least not without some heavy tweaks.
The PC himself was such a product of his time though. Hell his name was Narsil Grimm - I literally stole his name from Tolkien (don't squint, his first Aes Sedai was Ororo Monroe, and yes she had weather powers) then added some cool-sounding surname for additional effect.
I have lots of logs saved and the trajectory of my writing style, not to mention my partners', really shows there; at the beginning our poses were collectively craptastic, barely one or two liners, then a couple of years down the line we were tossing walls of text at each other during emote fights. That's kind of neat to catch.
Anyway, yeah.
@Derp This is not the Hogpit. Folks, please do not take shots at each other.
@wolfs said in Regarding administration on MSB:
People are used to zero moderation whatsoever and there's a bit of a push against it now that things are changing a little bit, perhaps as if they fear it's going to lead to further moderation and tighter rules when Arkandel himself has already made it pretty clear that's of no interest to him here. This sort of nitpicking over what Auspice did also shows little faith in Arkandel's ability to handle things himself, whether the people pointing the finger of blame here realize that or not.
I mean I could handle things myself, but I don't want to. What's even more important, you (all) don't want me to.
The whole point of having conspirators, other of course than sharing the workload, is that I wouldn't be the single authorit-ah around here. I want Ganymede's NUKE'EM FROM ORBIT approach, not because I usually agree with it but because I don't. I want Auspice's empathy and viewpoint because when left to my own devices I really have few shits to give, and that requires a counter.
We are not a hivemind - by design. We are different people. We see things differently. That's okay, it's MSB in a nutshell; with how many of you have I disagreed with in all sorts of topics, on all kinds of issues? How many of you were mad at me at some point? Because I assure you, there have been several who've made me squint over the last few years.
I don't expect or want us to be a kumbaya-kind of forum. That's not who we are. All I want is for us to be able to disagree vehemently with each other and still be able to coexist. In that way and no other I don't want this place to be my-way-or-the-highway; we're not a MUSH. To me the ability to stick together even when we don't like each other very much is the reason this place exists.
I miss WoW. I really do. Or, rather, I miss my guild and the socialization around running M+ every evening.
But they treat their employees like shit and I can't condone that. I'm just sad because at some point they'll put Diablo IV out and I might not play it, either.
@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
Utopia shouldn't mean boring, we're just not creative enough for them. Just like the people who think "Lawful Good" means "stick up their bum".
That is correct. However consider that Star Trek is built around this premise; it's supposed to show us humanity at its best, or at least at a point of its history where they've (we're?) conquered many chronic social issues, and live in a society mostly free of racism, sexism, money-chasing, etc.
But let's say you're setting a game in the fifties (or the Victorian age) and you're trying to be at least somewhat historically accurate. It's quite feasible even then to accept or even to require PCs to be more liberal in their outlooks; certainly there were plenty of individuals back then who didn't look at a free black man or a self assured woman as a bad thing, but societies as a whole did. Doing away with those parts ("in our version of London all races are equal") can still be done of course, it's simply not the same thing.
Can it be creative? Damn right it can be. You can create alternative settings of just about anything and make them a blast. Utopia isn't the problem, a lack of vision is; if you change one major aspect of life then you need to chase those alterations down their rabbit holes to see where they lead, and see how you can turn the outcome into something fun. So there's no racism in your city - awesome! What happened to slavery? Did the United States still have a civil war? What was Britain's role?
And the biggest question... what does that all mean to the actual RP you will do in the game? It's not about just being able to use Michael B. Jordan as your PB, it has to all make sense as a whole. Which takes a bit of work.
What I am really hoping the Microsoft acquisition of Blizzard will do - aside from actually helping the toxicity in their working environment, which they almost certainly will, since it also helps them do 'reset' most of its management without the controversy of firing them - is actually address the overall way the games themselves are set up.
For example World of Warcraft has been relying on long, long grinds to stretch out content and prolong subscriptions. Repetitive quests that need to be done (often from scratch on alts) to gain access to essential part of your characters' abilities have long been a staple of how things are done.
If they fold subscriptions into Game Pass it is possible they will rely instead on the game's own merit, and the fact your money is going toward the overall content instead of only WoW.
And that would be lovely.
@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.
I am often frustrated by the same thing. In games we kill hordes of enemies without the social stigma, right?
However that's my emotional response. My brain chips in to re-inform me that murder, as a whole, is pretty much universally condemned. Sexism or racism are alive and well everywhere around us.
It's way easier to be triggered by something that has actually happened to you or someone you know. But how does that relate to gaming when that's just an IC point of view not shared by players? Well, that's what this thread is about.
I'm annoyed at myself about the way I allow myself to think of gaming if I'm not being careful.
For example I was reading a thread about which class people plan on playing in WoW's next patch. However some of the posts were like "I always play warriors!" or "I'm gonna play a shaman because I like throwing lightning bolts!" and that annoyed me. Those are not quantifiable reasons, dammit, where are the logs showing that those specs are competitive? Are their new set tier bonuses powerful?
And then I remember. Oh, it's a game. Right. These people are basically saying they're having fun and I didn't think it was a good enough reason.
Dammit.
@bored said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
But I've also seen plenty of people latch onto the fantasy versions to a degree that was intense and obsessive, which saw them cross into OOC nastiness vs. those players, and which probably (and in one case not even probably, I know it for a fact) related to RL views.
I chalk this up to players not being able to properly separate IC from OOC very well, which is a way more widespread issue. It happens everywhere, too, across the board and on nearly every game I've even seen. Even where there's no real 'race' per se or mindset for someone to use when picking a faction.
You even see it in Horde versus Alliance on WoW, like there's a kind of player who chooses one over the other. It's how we are... tribal creatures who need a 'them' so there can be an 'us' we then get to be part of.
So if someone's bitching about them asshole halfies or whatever it is... that's on them. I can't honestly say it's the game's fault for having a freakin' halfling race. If they had werewolves instead it'd be them asshole furries or them asshole bloodsuckers or whatever the hell. If you want to stick a label on others badly enough you'll figure out what to write on it.
@ixokai said in Chronicles of Darkness cyberpunk game seeking help.:
Ugh, Evennia just sounds like, 'okay yeah like in a year this game will still not be open'
Good, fast, cheap. Pick two. 
@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
Which brings up the dangerous question: What forms of discrimination are not valid?
Although that's a good question, to me it's at least of equal if not great importance to be clear about its application in terms of its impact on the game's intended theme.
For example let's say you have a Far West game. The setting is supposed to showcase certain discriminating themes (racism, sexism, etc) but every player you run into plays a liberal character yet NPCs stay on the age-appropriate side of the political fence.
There comes a point where, unless staff takes exceptional efforts to inject theme with regular doses of the aforementioned -isms, the NPCs' views won't make an impact; PC-to-PC interactions vastly outnumber every other, and if most characters' superiors and employers are typically tolerant and progressive then the game can easily end up in this bipolar state where something is supposed to be happening, people IC refer to it happening but aside from the occasional PrP no one actually experiences it.
Yet stories are about telling, not showing.
@vulgarkitten said in Arkandel's Playlist:
I wish you would come back to Arx
One day!
@misadventure said in Arkandel's Playlist:
Now I almost wanna try to play the Sin-Eater I had who didn't end up doing much.
You almost want to not do much. I like it!
@sg said in How do you construct your characters?:
@arkandel said in How do you construct your characters?:
"oh, no, that plot twist wouldn't work for a MUSH"
But really, what twists do work for a MUSH? I'm trying to think of one that I've encountered that turned out well or was interesting for the players rather than the staff running it having just a laugh. More often than not, it has months of planning and RP being thrown down the drain.
From that point of view twists means something like... say there is a power that's very unique but also very important to theme, and it's limited to a specific character or tiny group of them. That won't work on a MUSH because who gets it?
Some authors are really meticulous about the way 'special abilities' work in their settings, and those can usually be turned into amazing MUSH settings. Sanderson's Mistborn for instance where the same set of rules works for everyone, and major characters are simply better at using whatever subset they possess than others. Robert Jordan, for all he kept introducing ever-more-powerful characters as he wrote new books also provided an excellent framework for the One Power. The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks is the same way; just make sure PCs can't be polychromes and you are done.
But with other books that's not possible. If there are only a handful (or one) special character in the books then you could still base a game on that, but you might miss out on all the cool stuff. Similarly if the group itself is more numerous but their background isn't ("all characters must be members of the Assassins Guild trained there from birth") then you might be shoehorning everyone into a very uniform niche; it'd be fun for table-top, but you might not want every single character to be a cardboard copy of each other.
@quinn That could be the meta-premise of a Buffy MU*; the Slayers are gone, the world is going to hell, and who can do something about it?
Highschoolers, of course!
@bobotron What happens if you pick a PB whose actress then has a topless scene six months down the line? Do you need to look different now?
