I don't care so much about people who don't like pets. You can't help what you like or not, so if they just leave it at that they are fine in my book.
But the people who'll go out and get a dog then return it to a shelter because it's too much work, or they let it get really bad habits they won't deal with, or just far worse just abandon it somewhere to fend for itself... fuck those people so much.
It's even much worse if they have kids. Nice life lesson you are giving them there, buddy.
Word of mouth is so important to actually get players to give your game a try.
Most MU* players are very conservative, they'll stay where their friends are, so in a way they anchor each other down by not being the first to go. Your best bet to change that is to create some hype - why is your Vampire game set in NYC different than all that came before it? What makes it so damn cool? What are you gonna give me to come over and play, man?
If we're discussing all this perhaps Arrow should be in the conversation; the original (justified in my eyes) discontent over how crappy it got some time in season 3 was then compounded by absolutely rabid fans either shipping or detesting Olicity - the coupling of Felicity Smoak and Oliver Queen. It got pretty bad as apparently death threats were sent to Stephen Amell's RL wife along with anyone else who'd speak against the shipping.
It's pretty toxic even by fandom standards.
One of these days (perhaps even yesterday) scammers will start using robots to make their calls and the only time we'll be wasting by talking to them will be ours.
... Until our own robots can handle chatting up their robots and the entire exercise becomes pretty esoteric.
At freakin' last... Geist.
So a couple of weeks ago my Linux install on my PC ganked out. Okay, I had been messing with it a fair bit and was looking toward reinstalling anyway so whatever (although it could have died when I wasn't running a PrP at the time).
This morning it had issues again. Hrm. Odd. I try to reinstall it - IO errors. Well, maybe the SSD is dying on me, right? So I format it anyway, only this time after a boot fdisk doesn't even see it. Nice! Okay, dead drive. Let's install on the HDD for now so I can have a system? Nope! no joy. This sure is odd.
Only now not even the DVD drive will boot anything any more. Nothing better than a fried motherboard to start off a weekend, is there? But hey, at least I have this here crappy laptop to at least whine about it. 
Hey folks,
I don't remember if we've had an existing thread for this but even if we did it'd be ancient by now so let's have a fresh one.
I'd like to discuss Storytelling tools, methods and forms to best achieve as many of these goals as possible:
Bring a story out to a potentially new or fluid mix of players. We can't assume anyone in the group will know each other IC or OOC, or that it will stay the same between sessions (think '+event' as opposed to 'page <A>, <B>, <C>=Hey guys I already know...').
The initial steps don't feel railroaded. People shouldn't feel like the NPCs have yellow question marks over their heads, but still get a decent idea of what to do next.
If characters become inactive the story can continue. Important clues will still be available, critical NPCs can still be tracked down and interacted with, etc.
My ongoing difficulties with the above actually start with (2) as striking the right balance between open-endedness and laying a yellow brick road for players to follow without ST hints is tricky. After a PrP series gets momentum that's a non-issue since it feeds itself through characters' own actions and everyone's - including the ST- increasing familiarity with the now-refined plot, but before then I've rarely been satisfied with it unless I was dealing with top-notch, creative players able to sink their teeth right away with minimal prodding.
For the most part (1) can be a thing too - sometimes I personally just give up and employ the ol'NPC-in-the-tavern super cliche to openly hand-feed the initial information. A tool I've used in several different MU* for example is the Narration Company, an IC group of highly competent consultants and contractors who hire local talent (ahem) to do specific jobs; it's sometimes worked pretty well, but maybe you guys have better ideas on how to achieve similar things. Use examples!
Finally, (3) is a practicality anyone on a MU* has to be mindful of; people lose interest, access or just disappear. If one of them has/knows the unique McGuffin the entire story is based on then you might have just gotten screwed; alternatively it's always annoying when the plot is to save the world/city from annihilation from a time-critical villainous plot and the people involved start logging on once a week; what happened? I guess it wasn't that big a threat or? This is actually the most common of my three bullet points (or at least it has been for me) since players are frivolous, and will give a new MU* a try for a few weeks then flake out, so handing the reigns over to a new generation of do-gooders isn't always/easily feasible. How do you deal with it, if you do? This also works against the idea of running customised plots for specific groups or characters.
If you have any thoughts please feel free to share. 
People who grade books they've not read because they aren't out yet on Goodreads. Sure, some of them may have preview copies but I doubt the 300 folks for Brent Week's Blood Mirror have all gotten them in advance... and it currently has the best rating in my entire to-read shelf.
Fanboys are destroying the rating system by making it untrustworthy.
Hey guys, if I paid you a billion internet dollars would you consider adding a +meetme command?
I love Westworld. It's so good.
I just hope it can cash the cheques it's writing, because the last time I watched a series stockpiling its mysteries at this high a rate it was Lost, and we all know how that ended.
This post might become a rant but I hope it's a constructive one.
For starters as others have mentioned no one thing kills games. In my experience for the most part many are simply failures to launch; early code issues (especially stability or CGen related - if it's too frustrating to create characters players move on), or an unpopular niche theme (requiring people to be familiar with an obscure novel for example).
What I've noticed though, and it happens recurringly, is staff's inability to get their priorities straight.
As a quite real example I've played on MU* before where I was baffled at +jobs about PrP running being downright neglected, sitting there for a week unread or even afterwards staying unsupported, while they pour their resources into creating and maintaining stuff like approved equipment lists. No game has ever died because players sit there going "well if I can't have a Smith & Wesson Model 500 because only that Magnum Taurus Model 608 is available I guess I'll just have to find another place to play!".
Games have died because there's nothing happening and players shrug their shoulders and stop logging on there; they start off well (new, fresh MU* tend to get a lot of folks rolling there to test them out) but then they start leaking activity, and the fewer people remain the fewer opportunities exist for the remainder ones to find roleplay, so they taper off as well.
I don't get it. Plot translates directly to activity and keeping their players active should be a top concern yet MU* get it wrong, and it makes no sense; it's so obvious to see. PrPs scale up, one person can keep 4-5 others entertained and not just while they're running scenes but afterwards too, feeding them things to do, and not that many players run them, or at least stuff more involving than meet-and-greets.
TL;DR: If your players are bored they will leave. Games get visited by many players as they open but they won't stay unless you make sure they continue to have stuff to do.
Good news everyone! @Bobotron is going to run a MU* where all of those things are playable.
Hey folks, I wanted your opinion or something.
Maybe I'm wrong about this but have you noticed a shift toward 'plotless' scenes in the last few months?
What I mean is that very generally speaking player-ran events on MU* tend to fall into certain categories:
Something with a plot. There's a ring of thieves in town and someone's hired the characters to hunt them down.
A 'slice of life' scene. Typically one-shots, they're mostly about giving characters something to react to. Characters in a 7/11 when two masked guys come in to rob the place! What do you do?!
Plot-less social scenes. Family get-togethers, beach parties, let's-plan meetings.
I seem to be seeing less of the first happening than I used to but that might just be my impression, what does it look like from where you're playing?
"When I was little, I didn't care about things like what to wear, my parents dressed me. Looking back at old pictures, it's obvious my parents didn't care either!"
The issue with the 'transactional' part is how... the 'nice' doesn't continue.
The other issue with it is the definition of 'nice'.
I'm not a rapist, I never hit you, I didn't steal your money or take your stuff!
Dude, talk about placing the bar low. That's not going beyond and above, it's the baseline. Hell, probably a bit under the baseline.
@Monogram I don't watch any type of fighting sports but I really dislike the hatred and glee that came from that... showing every second of her defeat like it was a celebration.
I get it, she was unbeaten and then she got beaten twice in a row. She's still better off than I am, at least, or she will be after the bruises fade so good for her. All athletes lose eventually.
@surreality said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:
A really good friend of mine used the analogy, 'for a guy, a shortcut through a dark alley is a quick route home or an adventure, for a woman, it's the looming threat of a sexual assault waiting to happen.' He isn't wrong.
Yeah. I've had a conversation about it recently since I've been going to a 24/7 gym very early in the morning (when it's essentially empty) and it's completely different for a man compared to a woman; my biggest concern is waking up at an ugly hour and hope I don't have to fiddle with the safety pins on the rack. The idea someone might follow me inside the place where no one can see/hear me call for help and where no one could even manage to enter without a card to help out in the first place is just not a concern on my radar.
@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:
Honestly, I think the women who are all "I'm a girl and I don't know how to play games, plz give me things. Teehee! I'll fuck if you buy me a mount!" do more to hurt how women are perceived in gaming more than anything else.
How about this: Recently a female player's PC met a male's one time on the grid. They didn't know each other OOC beforehand and the scene was completely neutral. Within a couple of days that person was sending them pages when she was playing with other people, pestering her with pages, etc. This was happening just a bit under the threshold of actionable harassment (possibly by design) but the player in question was perfectly capable of handling it on her own, setting limits and cutting that person off.
However... he is still there. Someone else equally unwilling to go along with this misadventure might either buckle under the pressure and go along for the ride or simply stop logging on. Either way this is a scenario where everyone loses - the game is out a player or the person in question doesn't is put in an unpleasant position to begin with since even having to reject the advances isn't exactly fun, nor is knowing a guy's keeping track of her whereabouts.
These are iffy circumstances. I know folks will just hop in here and suggest the banhammer but between non-reporting and false positives (the line between 'hey, wanna play?' and 'hey, why did you play with him instead of me?' isn't always conveniently phrased clearly) nuking from orbit it's not a panacea at all.
But what is a better way to address such situations?