Posts made by Arkandel

Another factor I definitely pay attention to (but I don't know if it's as important to everyone) is how much effort staff puts in. How excited are they about their own game?

For instance if the game is small I expect staff to have more time to invest per PC, giving extra attention to giving hooks for RP, background tips... just going the extra mile. Or plots - they should be able to customize what's being done a great deal compared to running stuff that's a little more generic, as they'd have to do if they expected 5-7 characters from an active playerbase of a hundred.

But yeah, if you show up thrilled to be running your dream game you bet I'll respond to it. If you sit on the general channel and handle CGen no different than any other MU* then that kind of thing is contagious too.

@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

I mean, it is empirically incorrect, but it's still embedded in some of the older texts.

It's a classic well documented issue that over-management stifles efficiency 'when the accountants take over'. And it's true. It happened to almost every tech firm we've seen from Microsoft to Apple eventually.

But for the NBA specifically the effects of these strategies are there for everyone to see. It's very easy to screw your team over by committing too much of your salary cap to bad contracts; look at OKC now, a promising good team with a mediocre immediate future, since they have to keep Melo (who has a player option for another year) and that means they'll either pay a massive $190m in luxury tax next year to keep everyone or they'll have to let half their bench go. They're screwed either wya.

And that's a best case scenario; the Lakers had to give away a #2 draft pick just to dump a bad contract (Mozgov) away. They'll have Deng in the books until 2019. Bad choices stick with their teams for years.

In the mean time well managed teams prosper; Boston is flirting with another Eastern Conference Finals appearance this year despite the fact they lost one of their top two players in the first five minutes into the season to an injury... and they stand to get at least one if not two first round picks next year. It's obscene. The Spurs haven't signed almost anyone in free agency in years (LMA is it) and Kawhi is out for more than half the season so far, but they have one of the league's best records.

For the league there's no denying how important culture is. It's huge. The effect is very clear.

@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

For me, this is why I am not a fan of MBAs running things.

I hate you.

@ganymede The answer is almost always the same - culture.

To keep things in an NBA scope, there's a reason why the San Antonio Spurs have been so successful for so long, and it's because top to bottom, from the owner to the GM and then down to the coaching staff and the players, even the trainers and physical therapists everyone is hand-picked for their chemistry and attention to detail.

Conversely that's also why half the league has hand-picked former members of the Spurs family for their own staff now.

In a culture like that no meteorites are allowed; the franchise has specifically and intentionally not gone after big names in free agency for instance if they were divas, no matter how good. They just don't even try - and the reason that happens is the GM knows he's not going to get canned if he fails to grab a Dwight Howard or a Carmelo Anthony when they become available in the off season. That's not a luxury every front office enjoys. The Pelicans and the Nuggets of the league, ran by owners or boards of managers, don't have the same understanding.

And so they wallow in that bittersweet spot between doing well and doing horribly - the one that means they don't go anywhere in the playoffs, or have first round exits at best, but they aren't low enough to actually grab and develop some good draft picks either.

To get back to your comment though, banks and investment firms had the same problem as the NBA does decades ago. How did they deal with employees who'd try to get some quick profits right now, since that's what their bonuses and job security were depended on, even if that meant they bet on portfolios that failed to return on the investment ten or fifteen years down the line? They gave them more stability, and tied their bonuses on their longer term performance.

I was listening to a pretty interesting podcast where Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets GM, was sharing his insights on how the NBA teams get saddled with some really bad contracts, the kind that lock them into mediocracy for years.

So let's say you're a General Manager and you suspect you might get fired if your team doesn't do well this year - there's a lot of insecurity in the field, alone with coaches they can be gotten rid of very easily. So your job's on the line, right? You gotta produce some results now and sometimes there's slim pickings in the free agent market.

At this point you have no incentive to not take risks because... you'll be fired anyway otherwise! So you go and sign someone unlikely (hello, Deng) hoping that they end performing. If they do great you're a genius hero, if they don't... well, they can't fire you MORE now, can they?

So you get a guy paid $20m a year to not play. I wish someone would take that chance with me, dammit.

@shelbeast said in Good or New Movies Review:

Black Panther was fantastic. Only critique I can give is some bad CGI and lighting where it looked obvious that characters were in front of a green screen. Natural lighting backgrounds, artificial lighting on the characters. But the movie as a whole... one of the top five Marvel movies, for me.

I concur... the green screen fight was probably the worse part of an amazing movie for me.

But in many ways it featured the best Marvel villain so far - because he was human. He wasn't a caricature who was basically evil because muahahah, there was a perfectly valid reason for his peeve and in many ways his path could have been a hero's journey. It gave us a reason to sort of root for him and invest emotionally in what happened to the guy - unlike whatever the name of the character Robert Redford played in Cap 2 even though it was still a pretty damn good movie otherwise.

Oh, and the best Disney princess ever. Hell yeah.

After being burned by a bunch of nWoD game clones ran using the least effort possible, I can confirm this one looks different - staff seem to be taking it seriously, placing more work into the setup and challenging themselves with the setting type and scope.

Here's to hoping, we've been needing a good MUSH of this sort to come out ever since Eldritch closed its doors.

@packrat said in General Video Game Thread:

I have been playing Kingdom Come - Deliverance.

I've been looking at it... and the one concern I had was that it required a lot of micromanagement? like I'd need to wash myself constantly or be penalized in social interactions, pay constant attention to my encumbrance or be unable to move in plate, etc.

I don't know if I'm ready for that kind of commitment.

What @Tinuviel said is true. What I'd add to it is try to coordinate 'activity pushes' like that for when you also expect to have the most staff and/or PrP runners available.

Basically the way it works is people give games very few chances if they aren't already well populated - sometimes even just a single chance - so if you want to keep them, you get an equally very low number of chances to do so.

What it comes down to is... if I see a post like this then I might log on tonight (for example). If it happens to be when you're busy IRL taking care of perfectly important stuff, things no one can possibly blame you for prioritizing, it could still mean there are no plots being ran or things happening, and I'd just spend a few minutes bored before logging out. Well, you lost me. It's not your fault, it's not mine either... it just happened.

However if you make a big push for it during a couple of weeks when you know you'll be around and so will all your plot runners, and there's entertainment shoveled our way very regularly, maybe I'll stick around. Then @Tinuviel decides to also give it a try, and I'm there to play with, so he sticks around. And then others come, see us both there... and they stick around.

Then you don't need to coordinate constantly, because we'll generate our own RP and everyone's happy. But kick-starting this perpetual RP machine takes effort and time upfront.

@ghost said in Bad Actors, and Bad Behavior (extended):

If we're going to define, or discuss "BAD" behavior by players, and if it's defined by very specific things such as sexual harassment, stalking, doxxing, etc, then I think we should take a moment to acknowledge the amount of hell some people have gone through on these boards for things like:

Some things are fairly universal. Those are the only ones we can really address in a generic post - sexual harassment for example is a pretty damn good bet for what constitutes a no-no.

Everything else depends on each game's staff. Maybe I am more SJW than some and would ban you for calling someone a bitch; maybe you are a real elitist and would condone someone being derided for too many typos in their posing. But we can't possibly apply any rhyme or reason to such things, as they are just too game-specific.

@lithium Agreed. Guys, if you want to talk about OC vs FC do it in your own thread.

@miss-demeanor Gotham by Gaslight was fun. I really liked how they portrayed Catwoman in it, although not how much they ended up nerfing her at the end.

We might as well have a thread for this.

... especially since I happen to have a question. Is there any way short of recompiling the bloody thing to use a different character as command separator than the semicolon?

It's really annoying since ; is used in actual posing and chatting, but I can't see how to do that at a glance (or two). Any tt++ veterans here who can field this one?

@lithium So far it's fine. Just let's stay more on "questions and discussions about the game" rather than "criticism of its choices" and we'll be fine.

There are other forums to carry on the latter if anyone wants to.

@icanbeyourmuse said in DC : Gods and Monsters MUX:

It is also not fun to be told 'that is not how x person should be played!' I also have not seen anyone expecting to be 'catered too' just be given the option to make their own thing.

There's no doubt one of the hardest things about comics MU* is playing canon characters on them since not only are their players somehow supposed to be continuity experts who get derided if they're not familiar with everything that's happened in the last 20 years, but they also have to fit everyone else's criteria for characters who, let's be honest here, aren't exactly written consistently by all those different writers over that same amount of time.

But even so, it's a game's choice to run the kind of MUSH they want. There's nothing wrong with that. A game can't be all things to all people, or cater to everyone's tastes, and it's quite unreasonable to hold them accountable when they don't try to do that.

This sounds like a deliberate creative decision and not a bait and switch. They're saying "guys, we're not gonna have OCs". Okay, well, if someone wants to play an OC they can do it on another game, what's the issue?

@mr-johnson said in DC : Gods and Monsters MUX:

@lithium Oh come on you don't LOVE the idea of being forced to conform exclusively to existing characters from DC comics only? Why would anyone ever want to play a character they themselves designed on a game?

Because that's what the game is about. It's like asking "why being forced to conform exclusively to one sphere in WoD?". Because that's the MU*.

Batman: Ninja.

@mr-johnson said in Descent Reboot:

In my humble opinion they completely ruined the clans beyond recognition, and ruined any possible incentive for me to play. That's all personal opinion of course, other people are more then welcome to enjoy it I just wish there were more cWoD games because that has the clans I love, and the lore I can actually stomach.

Although I personally prefer the oWoD lore, it sounds like your complaint is closer to "this isn't the oWoD!" than something wrong specifically with nWoD. However, it's unfair to judge a setting based on what it's not trying to do - which in this case is imitate/copy its predecessor.

@zombiegenesis If it helps, I was pretty meh about episode 1 and only lukewarm about episode 2.

It's just that they used those as building blocks, and what they built was fucking amazing.

Say what you will. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery kicked some serious ass.