Best posts made by Arkandel

@lemon-fox said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

And as something of an outsider looking in, it's become really apparent that the socially unhinged people who keep sneaking back into the hobby to do the same thing over and over have irrevocably damaged the ability of this community to trust, as a whole.

In my opinion the damage a handful of people have done to the hobby itself is minimal, although to specific individuals it's much more extensive of course. We simply namedrop them into conversations to drive forth a point, quite often as an insult.

The truth is most people don't think about us in negative terms as much as as we sometimes worry that they do, simply because they don't think of us at all. The vast majority of MUSHers don't have to worry about their public image or if they've been forgiven about their behavior that one time since, unless they set themselves on fire, no one is looking out to see who they play these days or keeping track of their digital whereabouts. No one gives a shit.

It's like going to a gym worrying everyone will think you're an out of shape newbie. They won't, simply because they're busy staring at themselves in the mirror. The same applies to gaming - as long as they don't shit the bed completely most people are going to be just fine.

Also:

@faraday said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

I don't think it's quite that black and white though:

"Your character is an emotional train wreck and I can't deal with that. I insist on you toning it down if you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with my character."

"My character is an emotional train wreck. If you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with our characters, you have to take the good with the bad."

To be clear: As long as both my partner and I are okay with whatever's happening on the OOC level then I couldn't care less about the characters. It's just not a concern at all on any level. If we're both into cannibalization then I guess someone is about to fry, IC!

The only issues that matter are on the OOC level.

Oh, and there were apparently some glitches here and there. Minor things no one would notice, such as this:

I see nothing wrong here. Sure, staff could have made it more clear they were only going to open the game for that many characters, but they never said otherwise either, and it's not like anyone invested weeks pouring hopes and dreams into a character for nothing.

Then again no one attacked them over it either. It's fine to express disappointment, and those who did were pretty civil about it.

It is interesting though this game got so popular so fast where others not quite unlike it didn't.

@Bobotron It must have been difficult to wait for 15.5 years to finally have sex!

@saosmash Also let's not discount the platform itself. A lot of the positive comments I've read the last 24 hours came from people who hadn't used Ares before but were very pleasantly surprised at the facilities it offered - a web-based CGen, notifications and forums readable on a browser, lots of ways to create and join scenes, an automated combat system, etc.

That counts too.

Getting up in the morning after a streak of being sick and no longer having a cold.

14 days without any flagged content on MSB.

I appreciate that, folks.

To be honest I never understood the 'purity' angle unless there's a technical, universal reason that it simply can't happen.

For example: If you run an Anne Rice MUSH and you choose that in your setting, due to supernatural reasons, vampires can't have sex ("it won't go up, Cap'n!") then I can't play my vampire gettin' it up anyway. If I did so it'd go against a hard rule (sorry...) that makes no sense to violate. So staff would be justified in telling me that no, I can't do that in RP - there are physical limitations of the universe involved that my character can't supersede.

However even in fantasy realms unless there are similar universal physical limitations in place, people... mingle. Sure, most people in Dorne might look a certain way but even so I'm sure some of them ran into an Asian- or black- or whatever-looking fella/gal at a bar one night and had some fun. Nine months later, look, a kid who doesn't look like the archetypical Dorne person! That youngster might be part of a minority, sure, but why care about that so much in the context of a game that you wouldn't even allow it as a playable concept? It doesn't make sense.

@surreality said in MU Things I Love:

@Arkandel ...but are we sure it isn't just the flagging broke in some update or another is what I'm dying to know here.

Oh, I can positively verify flagging works since a whole bunch of people gave it their all just now.

Ex FaviIIa Surgo, also known as Lain, has been re-banned.

Yeah, it looks like we're going to be playing whack-a-mole for a while. Joy.

@Cupcake said in When To Stop Listening To Those Voices:

I keep trying to remind myself that what I feel is real, but it also isn't true. I just really need to stick it until the proof of it not being true outweighs the anxiety.

This is my take on it: When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

If you are finding RP, especially with the same people over a reasonably long period of time, it's because they want to RP with you. If they didn't they'd avoid you, and if they had other things they preferred to do instead they'd be doing them.

Obviously it's not as easy as telling yourself "okay, I have nothing to worry about so I'll stop worrying about it" since that's not how emotions work, but just look at what people are doing. That's the source of truth.

You know the drill.

@surreality said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

@Prototart That is such a fucking truth.

Look, straight white guys. Please, don't play lesbians to show your woke-i-tude. Wokefulness. Wokeaholism... woke-ever.

I'll go up one level; don't play anything to support an agenda. That's not what playing games is for, and it won't go over well when things which typically happen in games affect that agenda.

Alright, we'll start changing things around here. If you're not aware yet there is an ongoing thread in the Mildly Constructive section of our forum called Make MSB Great Again! where everyone is welcome to participate.

To help facilitate things @Auspice and @Ganymede stepped up when I asked them to help run MSB, which I am very thankful for. Both have been around here for a very long time (yes, I'm saying they're old), have stellar reputations, and together we should be able to steer things back to a more sane place. You can trust them as I will, and you can go to them for anything you could come to me (or more).

MSB will always have an edge. I don't want to lose that. You won't need to worry about censorship, that's not going to happen. But there have been rising levels of toxicity over time which rose to the point where a few bad, loud, angry posters were chasing away good, reasonable users, and that's something we mean to remedy and steer back to sanity.

There are sticky threads now in certain forums (namely our Adver-tis-ments, Mildly Constructive and The Hog Pit sections) which I urge you to read. Conversations diverting too far from these guidelines will be forked into appropriate forums, and blatant derailing will get repeat offenders some frowny faces pointed in their general direction.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to come to us and we can have a conversion about it. In case it needs to be said, if you want those chats to be anonymous they absolutely can be. For more public debates please go right ahead and post in one of the appropriate threads or create a new one if none of them covers your topic.

The Management.

I think to a lot of people - I really don't think it's such a small minority - every MUSH is basically a dating simulation.

Sure, you might be playing vampires, nobles, werewolves or space pirates but that's just the context; the point is to find a romantic/sexual partner and use the setting's trappings to enhance the experience. Is it TS? Do we have fangs? Then we bite each other, yay! Can we shapeshift? Time to get furry with it, yay! Mecha-suits? Uh, let's read the manual first but yay!

And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as they're not nagging, coercing or forcing anyone else into it there's no harm no matter how some people complain about folks in locked rooms and how they detract from the game; it's their playing time too. As long as it doesn't actively get in the way of anyone else's RP then that's fine.

My only objection otherwise is in agreement with @Sparks - there is so much focus on it the characters' arc can only burn out. It's both all too common but also not sustainable to see PCs hit the grid then find their soulmates in two weeks or less (sometimes much less); where do you go from there, when your goal was the romance itself? Well, you won the game - now what?

@apotheosis said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

It would lower the workload for administrators, allow for the Hog Pit to serve its purpose, and also create a reasonable mandate of civility in other forums.

Our workload isn't the primary consideration. We also need to feel good about what we do here, and administrating an even partially racist, homophobic, etc forum isn't something I'd be interested in doing.

It's weird reading about all your guys' wonderful families full of nerds. I just can't relate to it at all since my relatives - although they were all wonderful in all the other ways that matter - were and are not nerdy at all.

My mom always rolled her eyes at the "weird dracula movies" I was watching, never knew what games a bunch of us kids were playing on her dining room table and never really knew what I'm doing for a living, either ("he works with computers").

Even today my sister basically refuses to watch Game of Thrones or any sci-fi even though she watches a lot of other stuff. She just... isn't into any of it. My niece on the other hand, who's in her early twenties now and whom I spent hours talking to about Harry Potter when she was a tiny little girl, has been on multiple D&D campaigns already so the circle is finally broken.

I, for one, welcome our new post-deleting overlords.