Posts made by Arkandel

Moved this thread to Tastes Less Gamey on request.

@lithium I just hate pay to win. That's all.

If you're f2p fine, but let free players just take longer to get wherever. Anything more than that and they lost me.

@auspice The mental mental images for me were... wildly different.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Were you doing squats under that barbell?

Well, it wouldn't do much good if the barbell wasn't over me at the time. My first two-plate squat, three sets of five, zero issues... until the last rep. Then I became pasta under the fork.

@kanye-qwest said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@arkandel I mean sorry for the obvious question but what about a brace?

I was wearing a belt. It was on the descent, and dammit, I was bracing. Valsalva maneuver and everything. Still - boom!

Wild Things.

<sighs>

Alright, we'll start changing things around here. If you're not aware yet there is an ongoing thread in the Mildly Constructive section of our forum called Make MSB Great Again! where everyone is welcome to participate.

To help facilitate things @Auspice and @Ganymede stepped up when I asked them to help run MSB, which I am very thankful for. Both have been around here for a very long time (yes, I'm saying they're old), have stellar reputations, and together we should be able to steer things back to a more sane place. You can trust them as I will, and you can go to them for anything you could come to me (or more).

MSB will always have an edge. I don't want to lose that. You won't need to worry about censorship, that's not going to happen. But there have been rising levels of toxicity over time which rose to the point where a few bad, loud, angry posters were chasing away good, reasonable users, and that's something we mean to remedy and steer back to sanity.

There are sticky threads now in certain forums (namely our Adver-tis-ments, Mildly Constructive and The Hog Pit sections) which I urge you to read. Conversations diverting too far from these guidelines will be forked into appropriate forums, and blatant derailing will get repeat offenders some frowny faces pointed in their general direction.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to come to us and we can have a conversion about it. In case it needs to be said, if you want those chats to be anonymous they absolutely can be. For more public debates please go right ahead and post in one of the appropriate threads or create a new one if none of them covers your topic.

The Management.

@sunny said in Make MSB great again!:

I do not think this site should touch on handling issues that happen anywhere else but this site. So if the harassment can be pointed at here and whatnot, yes, please, deal with it.

Oh that's what I meant. We can't act on things that happened elsewhere, for the most part, if for no other reason than that we won't be privy to any kind of confidential information staff there may have, and not all people involved are necessarily on MSB to defend themselves or present their case.

But if it happens here, then it needs to be handled here.

@tempest Your question is a trap, any answer will make @Meg come after me.

@tempest I don't actually have any information here. Hopefully @Paris will provide something.

Mind you, we probably do need a robust policy on handling harassment. MSB lacks the separation of IC/OOC which is kind of a good and a bad thing - it's harder to conceal asshattery behind "oh, that was just my character, hah-hah" but also it's more direct when it happens.

Either way - abuse won't be actionable only if it's reported, and being in the Hogpit will in no way constitute an excuse. "The gloves are off" isn't the same as "carte blanche to be a raging asshole", and if that isn't very well understood then it will become evident.

A few days later, once I can walk again without limping following my lower back injury, I was masochistic enough to go to my gym's owner and ask to see the security CCTV footage of the incident - the idea was to see if I had horrible form or something during the rep that broke me.

Damn, it's not fun watching myself fold under the barbell like a card. Or trying to get up again afterwards. It definitely doesn't help the form looked... fine, which makes my job trying to prevent this from happening again in the future that much harder, unless I just give up and figure my lumbar spine is made out of wet toilet paper rolls held together with gum. Hopefully physio will show something more, because this is frustrating, and next time I might be down for considerably more time. For all I know I got lucky.

Meh.

@paris said in Make MSB great again!:

You allow known stalkers, with known pasts of stalking behaviors, to harass and slag other players.

I'm unaware of any stalking. I wasn't an administrator at the time it sounds like this happened, but if you give me some details - in private or otherwise - I'll treat it no differently than if it had happened today.

@wizz said in Make MSB great again!:

@arkandel
What do you mean by help? What are you asking for and what are your expectations?

From your (generic-you) end I need more adults in the room. I need people who will show by example how we expect players to act, and that MSB isn't where you go when you just need to rant and vent your frustrations at your perceived enemies.

Or to put it a different way, if you (again, generic-you but also you) just stop participating because of badly behaved posters, the scale is tipped just a little further the wrong way each time.

As for the rest, steps are being taken. Give me a minute here, guys.

@wizz said in Make MSB great again!:

I absolutely agree, I am not trying to say this place is some sort of horrible shithole, I've been here since the beginning and really enjoyed my time both lurking and participating in the past.

When ES asked me if I wanted to keep this place running - the alternative was shutting it down - it came down to a simple realization for me; the hobby needs a place like this. Well, it already exists. It's here, we might as well have it.

The reason I care about the forum is that it's here. It gives us an identity across games, and a place to discuss things both in and out of any single MU*'s context. It lets us keep in touch with old friends, most gathered in one place, and have conversations about them outside our friends' echo chambers. I use the forum to communicate with folks I haven't played with in years, folks use it who haven't played in years themselves, and I know there are others no longer in the hobby who might return - and it'll be there when they do.

Do I like the way we act toward each other sometimes? Hell no, of course I don't. If that means I'm a kumbaya-singing fool then so be it. I think we can improve, and I hope we will. I do need your help to do that.

@faraday Why does it need to be sudden?

But everyone gets flamed on MSB. When we are it feels like it's the consensus; that's not necessarily the case. The community in general is braver when riding a bandwagon, which goes well beyond this forum.

There's more potential in what we're doing than what we're seeing.

@wizz said in Make MSB great again!:

I was just saying that if people think that the behavior we've seen here over the last few months is not only acceptable but somehow appropriate or ideal for the community and that nothing should change (or...can change?

Why would this thread exist if that was either acceptable or appropriate? @WTFE can have his opinion, but I don't happen to agree with it. If I did I wouldn't be here either.

To throw another log in the fire, I'd like there to be a clear place on MSB that you can go, hat in hand, and ask for help.

Maybe all you have is the glimmer of an idea, maybe you have a fully coded game but no staff, but where do you go to find collaborators?

@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

That, though, is the basic problem I have with MSB. Every single discussion boils down to people telling each other "your idea is dumb" (which is a very short trip to "you're dumb for not realizing that your idea is dumb") when most of it is actually just different perspectives/preferences/opinions. It's the vitriol. The vehemence. The "this is what's wrong with MUSHing" or "this is what's ruining our hobby" of "these players are the worst". People are entitled to those opinions, of course, but I fail to see how it resembles anything approximating "Constructive".

It's impossible to objectively separate the two, that's the thing. Someone has to make the call whether an idea is being criticized properly or if the poster is going too far, which can be shortform for censorship.

I can't even crowdsource this. If I start counting flagged posts then we're just handing the keys out to cliques who coordinate to effectively place gag orders.

Maybe there's a better answer here, but until we come up with it, although I agree and I'd love for us to be more constructive instead of radiating pure negativity at each other over what seem to be thin reasons at times, I don't want to go too far with moderation.

But that's why this thread exists. Come up with that better answer, people!

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