Best posts made by Arkandel

@Warma-Sheen said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I'm probably repeating myself more than a few times over the last couple weeks, but it isn't just "playing a game" to many people. It is so many things to so many different people.

Here's the thing though. It is a game. It's what people sign up for, unless it's explicitly stated otherwise.

For example if I go to a soccer game, I expect to watch teams kick a ball around. If the person next to me is enraged and wants to use that as an opportunity to scream profanities or bash my head in that's only 'on me' to the extent that I should be aware such things may happen. He's still wrong.

@bobotron said in Shadows of Paradise: help wanted!:

Beast suffers from some dissonance though; the original pitch was that they were actively inflicting their horrors on humanity as a sort of pseudo-punishment and to 'teach lessons'

That's kind of the Lancea Sanctum, minus the Christian bits.

Also, we're on 1.7.4 now which is the latest and greatest.

It's not very well done but a list of new features in this version is here. I wish they had an incremental human-readable list back starting at least at 1.5.x where we upgraded from.

Mind you, there must be a separation between providing new ways to doing things - that is, allowing for the possibility things could be done in a different way - and figuring out whether that's for the best.

For instance let's take travel from A to B. In traditional MU* that's a very spammy affair, and some people don't learn grids to begin with so they bemoan it; different approaches have been taken to mitigate these issues, from not showing the full room descriptions while you're traveling (i.e. only showing those when you explicitly type "look") to being able to summon/jump to a friend with permission directly. And yes, those could still be improved with a web interface by completely eliminating spam altogether, choosing your destination visually from a minimap overlay or whatever else.

However.

That is necessarily the best way to do things. For instance World of Warcraft specifically moved away from providing instant travel (and still only allows specific static portals, mostly for use between expansions and not cities or landmarks in general) in order to facilitate immersion and the concept of a consistent world by giving players a sense of scale of entire sprawling continents, ruined kingdoms and lush landscapes they'd have otherwise never visited unless they had to.

It still doesn't mean moving to a new paradigm isn't important. As it stands we simply lack the technical capability, due to telnet's inherent limitations, to do many things differently. Other solutions are imposed by those limitations so they might be wild goose chases if we carried them over to a new platform.

@Seraphim73 is a goddamn (*) Whitecloak, is what he is.

(*) Bloody, I mean.

@gangofdolls said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

Instead, what I did experienced was that most PCs were hugely siloed into their situation. Many of them didn't leave their builds, except for plot participation. There was very little public RP and while some players were open to new PCs, many people seemed to be satisfied with their IC networks as they existed.

That's an endemic problem for nWoD games. I don't have good theories about why it happens, other than it's perhaps a cultural entrenchment - i.e. that it's roughly the same crowd migrating from MU* to MU* doing what they've always done, which is play mostly with each other and avoid uncontrolled interactions unless there's a carrot involved.

@lithium People who play/MSB from their phones are either superpowered mutants or masochists or something, but I can't even fathom doing that.

@thatonedude We don't use https for MSB because, well, we don't. There shouldn't be any sensitive information here (and if you're sending over some, well, you shouldn't).

Just make sure to not reuse your passwords, which is a good security practice in general, and I won't have to do actual work to implement Let's Encrypt here.

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

While I understand and concur with most of your responses, doesn't this sounds a little bit witch hunty?

Without some due diligence on the part of staffers, yes it can become something used against "good" players. But like @Arkandel said, it's better than the alternative, of letting problem players lurk in the community, waiting to harm other players and drive them away.

Also I think that's a bit of a strawman argument.

Although now and then things get exaggerated ("you're as bad as <X>!") it's rare for witchhunts to get anywhere near that level.

For the game-killing folks, there's a hall of infamy that mere besmirching by even a few folks from a clique cannot induct false targets into. Those people are a shit-class of their own, and have the track record to prove it.

@gangofdolls Partially that's game runners' fault too. But let's discuss it somewhere else (if at all) since this thread isn't about that.

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

Yes, some of us give a damn. We've just been outvoted. (to wit: look at the poll)

Although we've discussed this sort of thing in private I wanted to make a public comment here.

MSB isn't a democracy. If I thought not having a Hog Pit was the best option for us as a community then that's what we'd have now; no, what happened is that I was convinced to go that way based on the arguments made at the time.

At first what I was concerned about was censorship. It used to be MU* were heavily 'moderated' and I intentionally put that word in quotes; the truth is they were censored. Many still are. There are consequences for speaking against those who run them, which is a large reason why this forum exists - if there is something to be aired then it can be, and neither my views nor @Ganymede's or @Auspice's matter. The more we intervene the higher the chance someone will social engineer their way into ensuring certain narratives are less visible than others - as we are human ( * ). MSB values free speech - with very few exceptions ( ** ) you can speak your mind whether you like us or we like you.

But also the Hog Pit exists because cliques are a thing in this hobby. I don't want anyone having to second guess whose side we're on - because it frankly doesn't matter. That's not a luxury which, by nature, staff have on most game; they need to make calls, assign traits, bestow ranks and positions so their favor carries weight. On MSB it simply doesn't matter if we're besties since I, by design, can't do much to help you if you screw up. Yes, that also means I can't do much to help you if you're the one getting screwed over. But you don't want me as part of a clique and I don't want the appearance that I might to be in one, as there shouldn't be such a thing as 'forum politics'. We need to be peers or this system doesn't work.

Finally, I appreciate the honesty in this thread. I didn't ask you guys to evaluate us as human beings, just as administrators on an internet forum, and constructive thoughts are always welcome even (or even especially if) you disagree with some of the choices made in running it.

(*) Okay, two thirds of us are human.

(**) Come on, not being openly racist isn't too much to ask.

Ungrateful welps!

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Until you've been on the receiving end of the results of those policies, you can't really claim enough experience with them to call them compatible. It's easy to say that "they aren't that incompatible." You're not the one constantly being attacked and browbeaten for refusing to get on board with the normalization of ostracization based on nothing more than an accusation.

Do you think I ran MSB for nearly a decade yet I had not experienced personal attacks?

@demiurge That's interesting, but once you get many players won't it get confusing to not know who is responding to whom or follow the conversation at all, especially if there's more than one going on?

Not to say that confusing is a bad thing necessarily.

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

Why take the comments seriously if you feel if they have no merit. Play in your circles, if you are having fun and those you usually interact with are having fun with you, fuck the haters.

While this is sound advice, we can't help, or fix, or correct people - it's not in our job description. And I get it, if someone's talking shit about you, the urge is there to look and see what they had to say.

That's a separate MSB function, by the way... the ability to confront these things out in the open. Too often on a MU* - sometimes with good reason or at least for good intentions - these things are handled privately or without very good visibility, but the forum is here for those who want to out them anyway. Or it's a matter of people complaining about each other over pages and closed channels, semi-privately, where partial truths and misinformation can spread out of someone's control.

One of the functions Hog Pit plays is allowing this kind of ... let's face it, very confrontational kind of discusion, to take place in an open way. While it's not always going to go the way the OP wants, and it definitely won't necessarily grant them the closure (let alone justice) they want, it's at least there.

It's not much, but nothing we do here is.

Reporting problems and offering constructive criticism are legitimate reasons to post on any forum worth its salt.

If something's wrong it should be brought up whether it's 'new' or 'old'. I've experienced several problems with this version of the forum even after I cleared the cache, including Bad Gateway errors.

Having said that, it's a free service someone else is offering us. Whoever doesn't like it I'm sure @Glitch will be happy to give them a full refund.

This might just be my perspective but I always believed there were just two major issues with PC death in MU* for most people.

1. Ego.
2. Identity/social loss.

The first is clear if players take IC failure to coincide with OOC one, feel very protective of their character, identify with their PC's goals, etc.

The second is almost unavoidable. Your character dies and suddenly you have no ties to your friends. You can roll a new PC but unless it's basically a clone, you might be unable to get into the same plots, IC threads, be in on their secrets, miss out on the TRUE LOVE romance with your favorite partner, etc. Even the name people know you as is gone.

Sadly no XP system can fix those social factors.

@demiurge said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

I do keep logs of who posted what, but it's mostly for the purposes of helping law enforcement should someone think they can post something illegal under United States law, like a credible death threat against a real person or links to pornography that nobody should be allowed to see. As cool as anonymity is conceptually, I don't want my game to be a vector for any of that kind of shit.

That's a good policy.

That said, I'm actually really conflicted about this. Should I go for authenticity, which can be extremely fucked up in more ways to list here, or should I try to maintain a certain amount of decorum? Authentically speaking, people's internal monologues are filled with slur-laden rants, with socially unacceptable sexual thoughts, with word salad non-sequitur conspiracy theories, and other mental detritus. Most people have a few of these kinds of things going on in their heads. Why would a dreamverse with people from all different universes be any different? Why wouldn't a 40k Space Marine have a few uncouth or insane thoughts from the perspective of his own culture, for example?

OOC gameplay should - IMHO - always take precedence. You need to have policies even if they are generic else you will get asshats who ruin everyone else's fun just because they can, and in that case what good will authenticity do for your game if your players are being chased away by a small minority (often as small as a single person)?

But really, I wouldn't worry about it very much. It won't happen often. For all we publicize it here for popcorn purposes assholes of a certain magnitude don't pop up every day, especially after staff sets the tone to show what they will and won't tolerate.

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

If you don't want to do the stuff that is clearly in the job title, then don't take the job. I and respect all three of you, but damn, the 'but we do not want to do the things that we are here to do' arguments make my eye twitch.

I don't mean to be facetious but you are making two erroneous assumptions here.

1. What you think has to be done is what we are here to do

and

2. There's a line of qualified people waiting to administrate MSB if we weren't here

I never set out to administrate a forum. I did it because someone had to. @Auspice and @Ganymede didn't volunteer either, I personally asked them to help me.

I am taking threads like this seriously, and I respect the hell out of some folks posting in it, but there is only so much I'm willing to do. Heavy policing of every thread is simply not going to happen.

Do we want toxicity outside of the Hog Pit? Hell no. We're doing what we can about it, but it's not as easy a problem to solve as it might look without causing other, potentially larger issues.

• Why wouldn't you count spaces?