Best posts made by Arkandel

@wolfs said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@arkandel To part of that, I think there needs to be less demanding that people do this or move that or kick so-and-so off or else, complete with "If you don't do what I want, I'm out!" (At least, not without reasonable cause)

That's just petulant. Be better than that.

There are very few people I want to not see on MSB, and none of them are on this thread. I mean that. We have some really bad people in the community in general, they occupy entire threads, and it seems really wasteful to just turn on each other like we need someone to fight or else it's just not as much fun.

I don't even expect us to be excellent to each other, just to be... dunno, adults. If we go too far to take a step back, realize we had a bad moment, say 'hey, sorry, my bad' and just move the fuck on from that. It really frustrates me if we need rules and threats of punishments just to not tear into each other - it says something about us I don't like.

@Lotherio , @Ganymede, you are both monsters and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

I don't come to MSB to learn things.

I just came back from Justice League. It was actually good - much better than I expected. It could have used a better villain but the character work was convincing, and I can't tell how I feel about the Whedon-dialogue parts being as distinctive as they were.

@Apos http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/ ?

@krmbm I see no reason, and have no intention, of doing away with the Hog Pit.

The only moderation we've done so far is move threads to it, and the mistake we made was being too aggressive about it. No one's taking it away.

@Ganymede said in Historical MU*s:

Most historical games fail for the reasons already obliquely referenced in prior posts.
...
The problem, more often than not, is the lack of things to do.

FTFY.

@thebird said:

Edit: Also, the new Mad Max movie? I want to go spend my entire pay check seeing that absolutely ridiculous film. Love it.

Now I want to see it.

@Ide said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

But where can I officially register my peeve for poses that attempt to answer to four other people's poses in the same scene. Their character's head will be whipping around smiling, smirking, winking and nodding like an understudy in the cast for the Exorcist.

Yeah, absolutely agree. Just because you're in a scene with five people it doesn't mean you should try to respond to everything they do. It's a hilarious thing to even visualise!

My only issue here is that during such spam it's easy to miss something which was meant for you. I usually have SimpleMU highlight my PCs' names for this reason but for example if I posed wearing a hat and you say something addressing 'the dude with the hat' as the screen scrolls it's trivial to miss it.

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

In general, I'm more comfortable with playing fantasy prejudices than real world ones.

That's the key though. No one will get triggered because your PC says all shavs need to be driven out of the land, because none of us is a shav iRL (... I think). It's only a controversial matter at all because some people who've come out, or who have faced actual racism, or who've been mistreated based on their gender might not want to encounter it.

Fantasy (and sci-fi) racism is pretty safe in comparison, but not all settings get to use those tropes.

@Lisse24 said in Historical MU*s:

I think any game that is depending on staff to create all the Things to Do is ultimately going to fail. I just haven't seen a sustainable model for that - unless you count Fallcoast/TR, which is its own beast.

Players should provide the majority of Things To Do. But it's still staff's responsibility - on historical MU* and otherwise - to facilitate, encourage and get out of the way of them doing so.

I don't know why I continue to watch The Walking Dead. At some point I need to admit I have a problem.

@ThatGuyThere said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.

That's one of the reasons I don't like generalising on what the cultural differences 'MUDs' and 'MUSHes' are, since the lines aren't that fixed at all. We necessarily discuss ranges rather than fixed implementations.

For example I coded/played for a RP MUD. It had coded combat - where you went around and killed mobs, got XP/items/gold... all that stuff. However we very quickly discovered it wasn't applicable to roleplay; you couldn't pose the actual fights since coded combat lasted for under 30 seconds or so, it was affected by factors we didn't consider appropriate (lag for example - this was the 90s, too) and the first attacker tended to win since if you're in the middle of posing or go to the bathroom mid-scene you could come back dead. It made no sense.

So we decided combat should either need to take place before the roleplay which led to practical issues (what if your character begged for mercy, decided to run away, offer a bribe etc in poses?) or it'd have to be turn-based. We were in the middle of coding a proper system for that which would allow you to target specific body areas with different effects - the torso for more sheer damage, legs to reduce mobility, etc - but by that time the playerbase was dwindling so it never got finished.

The point is, if the MUD is supposed to facilitate RP and unless I see a coded MUD system that's superior to turn-by-turn I don't know of a better system for either MUDs or MUSHes.

@tempest That's my secret, I'm always listening.

... that came off way more creepy than I intended it.

@Auspice Sometimes this is a major lose/lose no matter what you do. Which is a shame but it's how it is.

Years ago I was a player on this MUD and ended up with a pretty powerful character which took almost almost two years to do. The game needed coders and I was young and stupid enough (sorry Theno) to sign up for it... so in a few months I was one of the three game runners. But I also had an important character, and some people complained about it - which I could see even then was an issue, but I didn't want to give him up either. I had invested so long developing him, and playing was the reason I was there in the first place... so was it better if I stopped coding instead?

Choices, choices. Most of them bad.

@cupcake said in Good or New Movies Review:

@bobotron said in Good or New Movies Review:

@arkandel
Wonder Woman's sequel is pretty assured; they even got rid of Brett Ratner because of the sexual harassment stuff going on.

And because Gal Gadot flat out said she won't do it if he's involved.

I read somewhere she never actually said it, but the rumor broke out and she never denied it either. In a way it painted her into a corner since she can't refute it either - since (again, based on Internet People's takes on it, which lawyers among us can correct me on) she could be sued for by Ratner.

@Collective said in [Request] Policy Template:

I'm basically looking for a common sense policy that covers the important stuff like:

Don't be an ooc jerk.
No, the staff isn't going to spy on your TS. (And dude, what was up with that thing with the duck?)
Don't cheat or break the mush, please.

And whatever other rules need to be there to encourage civilized behavior in our feral little tribe. Searching through said database sounds like a pain, so advice from those of you with experience would be a nice substitute.

Not to cheapen your effort here since you obviously mean well, but to borrow a page from Gany's book here - do you think having such rules is important, regardless of the exact wording?

What I mean is, if staff aren't assholes they are not going to do any of those things, and if they are then it doesn't really matter what the rules are since they can be unmade, ignored or obeyed only when it's convenient with little oversight by their players or usually even the ability to tell they've been violated at all.

I do still think it's nice to give your playerbase a taste of your intentions and mindset.

@collective At first I know very little. I've got a very vaguely defined idea in my head of who my T8S character is, for instance, and the overall direction I plan to hit the ground running towards, but the rest is a complete mystery to me.

That last part is by design, sort of. I could have probably worked it out in my head better but I've found it resolves more smoothly if it's done organically through his experiences and through running into the people I actually get to play with, in the plots we are involved in.

@Thenomain A battle.net tool would also have one massive advantage; an in-game interface (in fact several games supporting it internally).

All those Overwatch, WoW, SC2 etc players are very often in one-time groups formed on the spot, who currently if they want to chat while they play to coordinate etc they need to figure out which voicechat to use (which... not everyone is using the same one), then alt-tab out to go log on there and find each other. It's not a lot of work but it's some work which as you said might not be the easiest thing to do for casual computer users.

If instead these games, played by millions, offer everyone an one-click-and-it-just-works way of chatting with your group then the new voicechat will immediately become the de facto way of doing it. I mean overnight. And once people are hooked to it they might start using it for other things outside of Blizzard's ecosystem (which is almost certainly their plan all along) even if dedicated tools offer better featuresets overall.

Blizzard had tried this before, kinda, a few years ago... but the voicechat feature they offered at the time was barely even functional. It was a horrible implementation which caused it to be dead on arrival.

@kanye-qwest said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:

Kevin Spacey, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Louis CK....that last one hurts me. I was a HUGE fan for years.

You know what bugs me about Louis CK? For starters that he knew better - one of my favorite bits ever was one about rape, dammit.

But the other thing is... he's a really good writer, and his apology was pretty accurate and spot on, so I don't know how much of it is him and how much it's him trying to salvage his career. Other celebrities have PR teams, but the difference between some MBA drone and a top-notch writer is immense.

@Collective While you're at it, one more piece of advice - although @Sunny already mentioned it among other things.

Only have rules you can enforce. Since you won't snoop, for instance, how would you know what happens behind closed doors? And if it's reported how can you tell who's telling the truth about what happened since logs are incredibly easy to forge?