@sunny said in Regarding administration on MSB:
@faraday How was calling us all pathetic and saying that we were lying about something that was demonstrably true even remotely constructive?
Because it didn't start out like that. By the time it went there the thread was already Hog Pit material.
@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:
I'll stop being a rusty, cunty old bint, all right?
That's the most british thing I've read today.
@meg Sure, but I did make an attempt to explain.
... we have to use our judgment. If it's not consistent enough it's because we are not actually a hive mind (heh...), and we're making this shit up as we go along. The line - for me - is whether the discussion remains civil and attempts to be constructive; is it aiming to suggest ways things can improve, to point out things are not working, or is it just a full-on personal attack? The f-bombs are optional.
Having said that, you are right in that I probably overplay the 'you asked us' card. I'll try to stop, but it's so addictive.
@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:
I'm also pretty sure the whole "moderation" thing revolved almost entirely around policing ADVERTISEMENT threads.
That's incorrect. The whole "moderation" thing was about not making a dumpster fire of every thread everywhere to the point where people who wanted to participate in civil debates about MU* were being chased away.
@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:
@ganymede Again, I did that because YOU are a fucking useless pile of shit as a mod and moved an entire thread to the hogpit.
Would you please take a look at the forum this thread is in now? I know you are pissed off but that's not an excuse. If you can't refrain from name calling then you will need to take a break either way.
@kanye-qwest said in Regarding administration on MSB:
If you just want to ban spammers and 4chan trolls, fine. No need to hammer anything out. If you want to be threatening longtime posters with nebulous "you'll be unwelcome", or make suggestions on content in the hog pit, you probably ought to have your story straight. Both for yourselves, and so people will know what to expect and whether or not they want to expect it.
Being a long-time poster means nothing. I have nothing personal against @Tempest - I like her just fine. I would ban her in a minute if she steps out of bounds far enough.
As for what to expect and what not... we have to use our judgment. If it's not consistent enough it's because we are not actually a hive mind (heh...), and we're making this shit up as we go along. The line - for me - is whether the discussion remains civil and attempts to be constructive; is it aiming to suggest ways things can improve, to point out things are not working, or is it just a full-on personal attack? The f-bombs are optional.
We should (and will, going forward) talk among ourselves more but... I will greatly appreciate if every time we do our jobs we didn't have someone playing the "oh you got a personal vendetta against me, personally" card. We are moderating, we will continue to moderate. You asked us to. You need to live with that.
As a sidenote, really... really, @Ganymede is one of the most straight forward, fair people I know. If you can count on nothing else you can definitely expect brutal honesty from the lawbot. There is no agenda here, what you see is what you get.
So, for a mild dose of necromancy I wanted to address this here:
@tempest said in Fixing United Heroes- Too bad we cannot talk about it on the game:
I would like to report @Ganymede for moving this thread and committing treachery most foul. She has let the nazis win.
@Arkandel, don't let this injustice stand!
I know you're half joking but to give a quick answer, which can cover others' concerns as well. Please keep in mind I'm tired, and my ideal evening does not include MSB. It's the time I can actually play games or watch some basketball on TV, so if it doesn't make sense I'll go over this again in the morning.
The concern here seems to be that if a thread is in the Hog Pit it's 'hidden' behind the opt-in wall, and thus invisible to casual viewers. That makes our system prone to being played by malevolent posters who want to hide their dirty laundry from those viewers.
However MSB isn't a court of public opinion. It's not wikileaks for MU*. That's one of the roles we serve, and I think we've done pretty damn well in that way for a long time, but it's not our goal. Its purpose is not, to coin a term I never agreed with but have often seen, there to 'shut down games'. Not only does it not have that power, it shouldn't.
MSB is here for the MU* community, all of it or as much as we can have, and not just for the popcorn-and-lolz masses hoping to see someone burn a bit more in the court of public opinion. There are those - there are many - who don't want to read massive flamewars, fuck-you memes and personal attacks; that's precisely what the Hog Pit is there to do, it's a compromise between the two crowds.
So to actually address your issue (generic 'you' now, since it's not just you voicing it), if you think a thread ought to stay out of the Hog Pit then don't turn it into a dumpster fire. It will stay out of there, then.
The poster we all know was a staff alt/friend from UH didn't foul the thread up. Sure, he/she stirred the pot, but I didn't see any particular foul language in there. We stooped to that level ourselves - we did that - and in doing so, the thread went away.
So can someone play us like that? Use the system to hide their dirty laundry? Yes - by design. And yes - if we allow them to. We don't have to. If this guy had started shouting profanities that novelty account would have been banned within minutes, believe me. So ... take some responsibility as well here, please. If you want a thread to stay out of the Hog Pit, don't make sure it ends up exactly there.
Now, having said aaaaall that.... someone pointed out to me we could have split the thread better. We could have not moved the entire thing but only select posts.
I think that's something we can improve on, yes. It's just a matter of every admin figuring out this forum's ins and outs, not to mention having the time to do so. So to address @Tempest's actual complaint, I back Gany 100% here - it was objectively the right call to make - but I'll also see that we all us admins get some practice using our vast powers for which you hate and fear us , since we could have split up the nasty parts of the thread and left the rest up for public consumption.
If you have thoughts to share please do so. I actually felt we had been doing something good here - there were two cases of games lately where staff abused its own players and protected themselves which we didn't allow it to happen. That is a healthy sign.
Thanks for reading. I'll catch up on y'all tomorrow, my Tauren paladin needs some new boots.
I haven't seen a thread about this already, so... the Incel subreddit was banned.
Apparently the final drop in the bucket was a discussion where when a member complained his roommate had a girlfriend, others chipped in with detailed instructions about how to castrate him.
Lovely people, really. Totally well adjusted.
My process starts with figuring out what the character will be doing. The most interesting PC in my head is useless if there's no way to utilize them in the actual game; how will he interact with others? What makes him interesting for them to play with? What can he do in a group, why would other people go to him? What would his preferred role be in plots?
If the game supports distinctive factions and/or templates (Bloodlines, Legacies, etc) I definitely look at that at this stage as well. While it can be fun occasionally to shoehorn the 'wrong' personality into an archetype they're not a good fit for, it takes some special circumstances to make it happen. If that's the path I'll choose then it needs to be part of his progression (starting with a peace-loving bookworm who's shaped by in-game tragedy to slowly become something else), but since that can take a while I'd reserve it for games I expect to be playing long-termly.
I have some idea of those things before I enter CGen since it's then that I figure he's functional. A bookish loner is no good though, even if his stats could make him useful for others, so that's when I start gearing his background in my head - the guy needs to either want or be compelled to be social to some degree. At this point I know about what his skills and attributes should be geared towards, so I pick them and move on as soon as possible to the next stage; the background.
I don't like making characters with a very wealthy history. It can easily lead to a too-cool-for-school IC outlook which I abhor; the guy should never look at in-game events and go 'meh, I've seen worse' just based on his past unless that's somehow interesting on its own (and it rarely is). I prefer thinking of those as foundations for the future, stuff to build on - maybe he's seen some shit but he's not prepared for this. Or he has seen even worse yet now he needs to re-interpret his role and carve a new place in the world (which may not let him)... but there should be a wealth of options in there I can use to propel him forward. The worst case scenario here would be a stagnant character whose potential is capped by his own background story.
I freely admit I don't have any idea who a new character is during the first few sessions with him; I know what he is but his personality is under development. It's taken me anywhere from one to... many scenes before I went hah! and found a PC's voice when he allowed me under his skin. I sometimes read my own logs weeks or months later and I laughed because it was basically all wrong, but that's just a byproduct of this process. I start generic, try things out, probably make him more irritating or know-it-all than he tends to become later on, but it's never right off the bat.
I also hate redoing things I've already played. It feels like a failure if I have a 'type' that I like. I'm already prone to making characters who talk a lot because that's just my style (I know, stop gasping) so the last thing I need is to also play the same personality over and over again. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but I'd like to think I can pull different things off.
Finally... I don't like making characters who're too... in-your-face with their weirdness. I do like them being strange but not when it's anywhere near Fishmalk levels; there need to be subtleties, intricancies, stuff you don't see at a first glance. The character can be flawed as hell but I don't like that being in your face. I also enjoy playing them the less likable types sometimes; the idea everyone I play needs to be super liberal, free-thinking and fair doesn't sit well with me. They don't need to be assholes - people should still like them - but not perfect.
As for the appearance... I can't say I work on it too hard. I used to like artwork, but it's fallen out of fashion so I just pick someone who looks appropriate, but it's an afterthought at best for me.
<scratches head> Well, I just read some Linode emergency e-mails about the physical drive the VM MSB is running on is hosted on failing, so they had to migrate and restart the machine last night.
I guess systemd took care of everything since obviously we're here, and I'm happy to not have had to do anything about this.
Apologies if any of you tried to access the forum around 05:00-07:00 EST since you wouldn't have had much luck, apparently.
I thought this might make for an interesting discussion.
So let's say you are planning to run a theoretical PC - I'm not curious as to what inspires the character since it can be so many things, from a movie or a book to some interesting homeless guy you saw on the way to work, but how you plan things out after that. So forget that part; you already know kinda sorta what you want to play - how do you go from there?
Do you have a process about breaking down their personality? Do you consciously think about giving them flaws and what kinds interest you the most? Do you prefer to seek out other people and design ties with them or is that something you prefer to happen circumstantially or in-game?
How about their looks, are they an important part of the way you approach it or an afterthought? Do you pick them before, during or even after the concept stage itself?
Do you prefer a long, detailed background or a blank canvas to draw on - and why? Do you like to revisit it after the fact and retcon connections or events into it or do you prefer to leave it fixed?
And the last one... do you like to replay/recreate old concepts or are you done with one once it's played? Please note I'm not necessarily referring to reusing the exact same PC with a different name, but borrowing heavily from one you've already tried before. Do you think your PCs are very distinct or do you have a 'type' ?
Let's talk about characters!
@sunny The weird part is denying it. Who do they think they're fooling if it's literally word-for-word?
... The other (scary) case is they've actually convinced themselves they did come up with it.
@wildbaboons said in Anywhere for Requiem 2E?:
Yeah.. I think that's why most are set in the USA. Most players are from there, we are familiar with it and don't have to worry about folks telling us "you're doing it wrong!" regarding the setting.
That's why you need to go with a semi-fictional/Hollywood approach for all things unfamiliar. Anything else is madness - try to actually set a game in Roman times and keep things consistent within the historic era and it will most likely be a disaster.
Turn it into a Xena production and it can work just fine.
But barring very specific goals (typically someone trying to show off) why even try for the faithful, realistic approach? You want a game in Russia? Base it on tropes all the way. Corruption, crime, Putin, violence and rivers of vodka.
@auspice said in RL things I love:
Maybe we need an 'amusing RL shit' thread.
Well, if we're doing that... this is my public transportation story.
It was the summer between my first and second year in college as a computer science student, and I was on a train carrying a Visual C++ book I had just bought. It was one of those behemoth, thick as hell books so since I was bored during the ride anyway I was kinda flipping through it when I caught the old guy sitting across from my seat staring at me.
So I pretend I didn't notice but of course he continues to stare... and finally a couple of minutes later he just tells me this, which I haven't forgotten all these years later:
"Are you going to use what's in that book to help or to harm humanity?"
Dude.
@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:
@arkandel Don't forget, legit Vanilla WoW servers!
Upright orcs, goddammit. At last. And potentially seeing cities we've been walking in for more than a decade fall into enemy hands will be awesome.
I need to figure out what race/class to play. Love'em druids but it's been an expansion and a half now, I'm due for a change... and I don't know if I will require the class to have a tank spec this time.
World of Warcraft's next expansion is Battle For Azeroth, and it has a ton of new features, some of which are... really interesting.
It's going to be a much different expansion than we've seen in the past.
I'm just gonna leave this here... Thor 4D, actual Thor actors and interviews included!
@bobotron What I read was the rights for Thor stand-alone movies are kind of blurry (another company would take a cut), so the way they're doing it instead is 'splitting' a full featured Hulk movie into several arcs and plugging them into other movies.
Apparently Mark Ruffalo really approves of this approach, too.
Admin powers can bring threads back from THE DEAD.
Thor: Ragnarok was pretty good... if you go in knowing it's more comedy than not, and that it won't take itself seriously. Then you'll have a blast, otherwise you won't.
I did. 
Also Cate Blanchett, damn.
Something I read in a history thread and loved it. I can't guarantee it's true. It's funny though.
The headlines of a Paris newspaper from the time Napoleon was coming back from exile:
March 9
THE ANTHROPOPHAGUS HAS QUITTED HIS DEN
March 10
THE CORSICAN OGRE HAS LANDED AT CAPE JUAN
March 11
THE TIGER HAS ARRIVED AT CAP
March 12
THE MONSTER SLEPT AT GRENOBLE
March 13
THE TYRANT HAS PASSED THOUGH LYONS
March 14
THE USURPER IS DIRECTING HIS STEPS TOWARDS DIJON
March 18
BONAPARTE IS ONLY SIXTY LEAGUES FROM THE CAPITAL
March 19
BONAPARTE IS ADVANCING WITH RAPID STEPS, BUT HE WILL NEVER ENTER PARIS
March 20
NAPOLEON WILL, TOMORROW, BE UNDER OUR RAMPARTS
March 21
THE EMPEROR IS AT FONTAINEBLEAU
March 22
HIS IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MAJESTY arrived yesterday evening at the Tuileries, amid the joyful acclamation of his devoted and faithful subjects