Posts made by Arkandel

Just when I didn't think people could get stupider... Donald Trump supporters boycott Rogue One.

@Seraphim73 In some cases giving proper credit might be tricky. For example I really like the +events command and interface - it's straight-forward, easy to use... but if I re-implemented it for a game how do I figure out who made it originally?

That would be cool in general though. If you have a sheetless codebase with just a grid and maybe a customizable dice roller you can basically run anything.

@ThatGuyThere Well, in the example above it wasn't the case; we had been in development for a few months and used a different codebase, for instance, plus the theme looked very much alike because both MUDs were based on the same book series. It's not like we launched with the intent to be a clone of that first game.

But the point is still taken. The games looked alike after dozens of characters crossed over carrying all their IC baggage along.

For the record we ran the scene... 8 people there, it ran pretty smoothly I think. No alt-related issues so far that I've noticed, either.

Now let's see if people take the initiative and go out to roleplay about it across sphere boundaries.

How about this:

Years (and years and years) ago there was an once-great, dominant MUD which at the time had gotten a bad reputation due to its very iffy staff management - it had turned into one of those early 'dictatorship' games. However people weren't leaving although they were mostly unhappy there since they had established RP, friends playing etc... sound familiar yet?

So anyway, we were working at the time on a rival MUD - it wasn't going to be as feature rich as the first one which had years of development on us, we knew that. But since we were launching in the same theme (based on certain books) I pitched the idea we could honor people's ranks, backgrounds and stations if they were coming in from that other MUD.

It crippled that first game for a while... it didn't last but we absorbed a huge chunk of their playerbase for months.

Was it theft? Was it even borrowing? YOU decide.

Since Westworld's season is over, without spoilers, I can say it was amazing. Two things in particular impressed me.

1. The amount of attention it paid to detail - it's highly re-watchable because of it. Eagle-eyed viewers on the interwebs have caught all sorts of obviously intentional minor things from earlier episodes I'd have missed even if I was watching it 24/7 though.

2. It told a full story beginning to end. Yes there are questions left, plenty of them, but it's no Lost; it didn't 'leave things for the audience to decide', it didn't hint at mysteries and not deliver, and there was no terrible cliffhanger at the end.

I can't wait for 2018 now.

Edit: Hah, @thebird... I was posting this when you were typing your question. Great minds. Or maybe it's our programming.

@lordbelh And improved. World of Warcraft 'borrowed' a ton of ideas about its theme from Warhammer and blatantly stole from games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, but it also improved on those concepts so that when it came out it was an epiphany on what MMORPGs could be.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

First trailer for Spider-man: Homecoming.

"When I was little, I didn't care about things like what to wear, my parents dressed me. Looking back at old pictures, it's obvious my parents didn't care either!"

@Apu There are like, a million female DC FCs! Unless games allow people to hog a bunch with alts I don't see why that'd be needed.

My entire office is sick. Well, about a third of our workforce is at home, and a couple of more are at work sniffling and coughing.

Our CEO was complaining this morning people are 'too sensitive' since we have a release next week. As a result one of the folks who didn't come in at first because he has a fever even felt he had to come to work since he couldn't get his VPN connection straight, so we got an even bigger share of the plague.

And the weekend is almost here. Dammit. I don't wanna spend it in bed.

@Lotherio Keep in mind what I intend and what happens are separate things. PrPs (rightfully) have a life of their own, especially when NPCs try to get things done in their favor.

My main concern is if there are ethical issues here inherent to alts being crossed. Frankly if I had enough players to work with I'd have asked alts to step aside, but populating the +event was a factor.

Hey MBSites,

I want your input on something.

So I have been running a story on a MU*; it's multisphere (i.e. it will entail separate scenes which affect/crossover more than one sphere) and its premise was approved by staff beforehand.

Now, after running the first scene in one sphere, which went pretty well and we all enjoyed ourselves, I set up a second one for another sphere. I got paged when I put the +event up by some of the players in the first scene and asked if it was okay for them to participate with their other alts in the second sphere. Since participation has been pretty low in general I said I'd allow it.

I've been approached since (by players, not staff) being told this wasn't right, and that there is a conflict of interest in allowing alts to cross between spheres for the same +event.

From my point of view I can see a problem - the idea of this plot was to provide a thematic backdrop for interaction between players from different backgrounds, and obviously there's less traction for it if many alts are involved; Bob and Joe are destined to never meet if they're played by the same person. But in my defense no alts are taking the place of someone who's not involved; even now we haven't hit the pre-determined maximum number of players for the scene.

But anyway, what do you think?

sigh.

It was just pointed out to me that the PrP I thought I had scheduled for tomorrow was actually scheduled for next week... because of course I fucked up the dates.

G'dammit. I wonder if it's too late to reschedule it for tomorrow anyway.

@Catsmeow Nah, @mietze doesn't give a shit.

There was a Vampire In Space MU* which launched about... a year and a half ago or so? It died on arrival due to lack of interest, if I remember correctly.

@surreality said in Shadows Over Reno:

When attempts to do something like that happened, the IC power split was spread around to both camps, but it felt artificial, awkward, and was generally full of head-scratch-inspiring bullshit -- the usual cronyism, gossip games, back-stabbery, and so on. (I mean the OOC kind, not the IC kind.)

Being very much a fan of the kind of environment @Arkandel is describing, provided it has enough reasonable oversight to prevent the kind of stifling roadblocks that @Miss-Demeanor is describing, well, I hope it will happen this time without a repeat of the last go 'round.

You know what the problem is with this kind of environment, which I do enjoy very much myself? It's very hard to intentionally create as staff since it depends on a set of conditions which are difficult to plan for; it doesn't need to be a perfect storm but it's tricky.

So - for example - you need your major paragons to be spread out a bit, and that works exactly the other way on MU*; the typical case is that people see activity in a faction and flock to it ("hey, LS looks active, some people I know are playing there, I'm'a gonna roll there too!") which results in one overly inflated super-dominant group and others decaying in its shadow. Worse, not only are challenging sphere politics hard to portray realistically when there are 12 people in LS and 2-3 everywhere else but the internal politics in LS can easily lead to more drama since there are only so many positions for all those people.

To fix this staff would need to be pretty proactive, offering incentives as needed for people to roll elsewhere - and I don't mean the easy, cheap kind ("here's 4 XPs if you roll Crones, guys!"). I mean actually going to good players you know are rolling and talking them into the exciting possibilities that could be found there ("our upcoming plot will feature Crones prominently").

But yeah, Reno isn't there yet. What it needs is work, polishing things up and giving people things to do. Sandbox is a fancy way of saying players are responsible for their own fun but right now that's a bit tricky because we know so little about the setting. There isn't enough thematic consistency for us to share the world, so either we need to be put squarely in the drivers' seat or staff has to give a more concrete framework of what's out there.

At the moment I can't tell you which Clan my character's Primogen is from or what the relations between Crones and the Ordo Dracul are like in Reno. That makes it really hard to portray politics with any degree of complexity.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Shadows Over Reno:

@Arkandel Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... the situation with Vampire@HM also lead to Elsa taking over both ICly and OOCly... and then doing nothing and not letting go. So while there was an uptick in initial activity, it died out pretty damn quickly... and then killed the sphere completely.

Well, the perfect storm of dinosaur XP and staff altdom is probably not going to be an issue on Reno. What caused the sphere to flare up in the first place though was the self-driven political complexity of all these good roleplayers spread across Covenants - different factions got temporary monopolies on talent (LS at first, then Invictus for a little while, then of course the Carthians) but it was never just one monopolizing interest.

@Apocalycious said in Shadows Over Reno:

I think we have a good set of people in Vampire that mostly means we need just enough staff guidance to let us do our work, and we can probably make plenty of stuff happen and have a great time. I don't think we even need much. Just someone guiding the framework a little bit will go a long way.

I agree. Even if we had a bit more information on the setting... but what's on the wiki and that one bbpost is really barebones and generic (two NPCs' biographies and a few names, no other information, for Primogen) it could be really handy. That there have been +events scheduled since the game opened then kept being cancelled and postponed since hasn't helped much either, I think only one of them actually took place.

In my time on Reno so far I've only seen one open PrP for Vampire actually ran: Cobalt's.