Posts made by Arkandel

The usual issue games have - unless they are already right at the top in terms of popularity in the zeitgeist - is there is too much demand for roles and not enough supply.

That is, most MU* would love to have more qualified staff members, PrP-runners, faction leaders. There just aren't enough of them especially consistently. What usually happens is you find that one person who gets super active for a few weeks, runs a bunch of plots and then disappears. Staff positions themselves are notorious for being behind revolving doors.

Would a full time advocate be nice to have? Absolutely. But so would other roles which are arguably of equal or more use to a game.

@tiredewok said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@arkandel

I don't think the streamers who have quit streaming their games did it to keep their own brands from being damaged. Not entirely, at least. I think a lot of them have quit streaming WoW and other Blizz games as a show of solidarity with those who have been victimized by them.

Yeah maybe. I don't know. I'm pretty jaded about corporate morality when money enters the equation and streamers are very susceptible to being cancelled since all it takes is one click to unsubscribe.

Either way it's a bummer in many ways. An once great company is going down the drain (and has been for years, even aside from what's been revealed lately), the gaming industry has yet another scandal counted against it to show what a toxic niche in the industry it is, and some great games' futures are up in the air.

Although to be honest players are fickle. If Diablo 4 comes out and it's amazing I could see people flocking to buy it.

Well, Activision Blizzard done fucked up. With a major lawsuit in the works, sponsors fleeing after allegations of widely spread sexual misconduct in the workplace start to rise and their own employees coming out to accuse management of trying to deny it, even long-term YouTube and Twitch streamers are fleeing WoW since they risk damaging their own brand by association.

As someone who remembers it being a shining example of a creative behemoth making very high-quality games as of even only a few years ago, this is such a sad turn of events.

And trying to rely on denial tactics now as if in this day and age they had any way of keeping it under wraps is frankly disappointing. By the time they are done playing damage control they'll burn their credibility.

Several people from my WoW guild have already quit over it. With Final Fantasy XIV already being as popular as it is, it's not like players don't have other options either.

Look, screw you all cynical burned out nerds.

Ted Lasso is where it's at. Every episode is wholesome as fuck. It reeks with good will, especially for being as dirty mouthed as its dialogue often gets.

What a fun show!

@vixanic said in Good TV:

@arkandel said in Good TV:

A Wheel of Time production that's apparently already renewed for season 2 but has stopped twice due to Covid-19.

I am desperately hoping that this doesn't suck. I don't want to get excited (we've all been burned before I'm sure with the disconnect between expectation and result) but... I kinda am anyway.

My fingers, toes and other noodly appendages are crossed.

I think it will come down to how well they can translate the elements that made the books a fun read to the screen.

There was hundreds of pages' worth of content about how the One Power worked for example can't be quite transferred over as-is without it being boring, but they could spread it out across multiple seasons in a simplified form.

Then the sheer number of characters will need to be seriously fucking trimmed. We all have our favorites of course but there's no way in hell they can possibly bring them all in.

Also... well, Robert Jordan himself should have also trimmed so much of the plotlines because there were a ton in the books but we'll see what they can do with that.

I read the first season will have Moiraine as the protagonist which kind of makes sense both thematically and because Rosamund Pike is the one big name they have. The three ta'veren won't have a lot to do early on other than follow along, and even Egwene and Nynaeve would barely know how to weave yet. I'm hoping later on they'll all get the chance to shine.

In my opinion it will all come down to how good the casting is - that's after one of the things Game of Thrones was extremely successful at. For example Rand al'Thor's actor will need to carry a ton of weight on him after the first season as there's no way to hide the freakin' Dragon Reborn.

On a different note, how do we feel about the big productions in progress?

There are separate very expensive shows we'll watch at some point:

• A Lord of the Rings series based on events from The Silmarillion.
• A Wheel of Time production that's apparently already renewed for season 2 but has stopped twice due to Covid-19.
• Hawkeye, teased in Marvel movies with Hailee Steinfeld costarring.
• I... think House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones spinoff is also in the works although I don't know if it wasn't the one being cancelled? That whole franchise was poison-pilled by GoT's last season, damn.

Anything else you all might be into that's coming up?

@coin said in Good TV:

And I mean, people can be peeved, but like, I didn't say a single thing about gender; in fact, I think you're the first one to bring it up.

As I said I haven't watched the show, but the only reason I know about this controversy were posts I read (aside from this thread) which are largely about gender.

I doubt there would be as much outrage if the focus of the original series was on Evil-Lyn but this one was more about Teela. It's about shifting it from a male protagonist to a female one, and as such I have no sympathy about people who complain about that factor alone.

But I can definitely understand being peeved if fans liked He-Man and he's not in it enough (which I don't know if he is or not) or he's a secondary character.

Is it the worst thing in the world? No, they can just not watch the show, and if enough people don't then it will fail. There are certainly other remakes, revival and tribute projects of popular 80s properties out there.

@coin I haven't watched it yet, but it's legitimate to be peeved if the protagonist of a show you really like becomes (or seems like it) part of the support cast in a reboot.

I don't think that's necessarily a gender thing.

The way I see it, social scenes are a force multiplier. They enhance everything else; metaplot, factions, character progression, PrPs... as a game-runner you ideally want all of those things to branch off like crazy onto your grid, spawning a wider net of interactions than you can yourself arrange.

Without that your PrP is an one-off; it lives in a ST/GM's presence and effectively ceases to exist when they are done.

The key to make these scenes fun and enjoyable though is to provide the kindling. Without that they are sterile; you can only meet so many times with Bob to feed him pieces off your background story. But what if you tell Bob about the thing that happened at the hospital the other night? Or you ask him if he can help your quirky packmate with getting his cat back from his evil ex?

In other words, as long as your MUSH is semi-active and not a sandbox social scenes will be fun and enjoyable. They just need fuel. And if they don't, you have a bigger problem to fix anyway.

@derp said in Good places to Sandbox/Anyone interested in forming a group for Sandbox RP.:

I mean, you might as well ask how to get people back into telegraphs and steam engines.

Now on that I disagree. A modern train is better in every aspect than a steam one; telephones or e-mail both cover every aspect of a telegraph's functionality and add more features on top of that.

Roleplaying in real time through words in a persistent multi-player setting is a very unique thing that's not being covered by any other type of game (that I know of).

For example while you can RP on an MMO you're limited by the graphics engine, and although you can /emote the words themselves an afterthought compared to the nuance, descriptiveness and details you can add in a pose. It has other strengths, obviously, but the goal is also different.

@derp The far more relevant problem to solve is how to get more new people involved than are fading away from the hobby, rather than how to get back the bunch of old farts who got too busy to play after adulthood smacked them in the face.

@warma-sheen said in The basketball thread:

But... that's the nature of the game, and you can say that about most champions most years, especially recently. So I'm just happy he got his ring, however it happened.

Kawhi gets hurt, Golden State wins versus Spurs.

Westbrook gets hurt, OKT lose their best chance to win one.

Kevin Love gets his shoulder pulled out, Golden State wins versus prime LeBron.

KD, Klay get hurt, Toronto wins it all versus one of the most stacked teams ever in Golden State.

These narratives to me are just fun as conversation fodder (or click bait these days ) since it's just in the nature of the game for players to be injured. Just about any year we can point at least one hopeful team that lost at least one meaningful or even critical contributor in their playoffs run.

A chip is a chip.

@lotherio said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

The difference for me is, we're voicing opinions and they are all valid. Just the near absolute of all modern games suck and everyone hates social is a bit extreme.

The way I read this is that it's commonplace in people extrapolating from their own current experiences. As you start to burn out everything looks shitty and it's easy to lose touch with the fact not everyone feels the same way as you do, and may be having fun with the stuff that still feels repetitive, stagnant, unfair, imbalanced, etc especially since you may still feel compelled to convince others. Why can't they see it?

It happens all the time with MMOs for example. "This game has turned to shit!" is a real cliche since players literally pay money to log on week after week, month after month, to tell everyone in public channels how little fun this all is.

I think the core of the matter is gaming isn't supposed to be life fulfilling. Hobbies aren't. Setting expectations that high for something you invest very large chunks of your time to is a very human, very flawed thing to do.

@misadventure The NBA specifically is as much about resource management (fitting the right roster under one's budget, which is more or less what salary caps are) as it is about the sport itself.

General Managers strategize, trade players and look for hopefuls through the draft more or less like a trading card game with years as their horizon which - depending on how you view it - is either a very high stakes or a zero stakes one.

It can be high stakes for fans since if the GM makes the wrong trades and creates albatross (baaaad!) long-term contracts the team will stay shitty for years since their salary cap space is all taken up and they have no good way to free it before those contracts expire.

And it can be almost zero stakes for team owners especially in large markets because fans are gonna go buy tickets to their games and merchandise anyway. The New York Knicks for instance have been absolute shit for twenty five years and they're making money over fist, so...

Just to clarify an earlier post of mine, when I said I didn't like "bar RP" I probably didn't qualify it enough with the important clause that it's when it's the grand majority of what RP in general consists of.

Social RP, either to develop characters or to allow the aftermath of PrPs to branch off and develop 'off screen' is perfectly fine. I've no issues with it, especially since in fact those kinds of scenes can directly become lead-ins for more plot.

My issue is when it is not a choice but pretty much the only option in the absence of dynamic elements. Many games that I didn't enjoy were essentially just that - sandboxes with some kind of theme written on their wikis but lacking either plot runners or a large enough playerbase to keep things fresh.

In that light it's probably wrong to use very large, active games as the benchmark. MU* like Arx today, Haunted Memories or The Reach in their hayday, etc could get away with a lot of this because then there is enough stuff happening in the wild to keep it moving. There are ranks people want to get, disagreeable villains others plot to oppose, and that activity becomes self-sustainable through its own participants' sheer critical mass.

On a 'regular' game with 10-15 logins this is much harder. It's very easy for that environment to become stale and sterile, whether staff meant for it to be essentially a sandbox or not. Once that happens if I'm on and the only options I have is go to a bar and see if I can talk about paragraphs 3-4 from the wiki with someone else, do an introductory scene or scope out the chance for a romantic attachment then it's limiting. Not because any of those things in a vacuum is a bad thing, or not enjoyable, but because that's all there is.

I'm'a just gonna put this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiYGxlr74mw

@buttercup That's quite a story. I am really sorry you had to go through all that; your family's stories make it clear what sports are really about, and those idiots' actions about what they are not.

If it helps at all, Booker + Ayton are the real deal. I think Ayton can legitimately have a Duncan-kind of career. All the team needs is stability, fleshing out the bench and maaaaybe if you can replace CP3 (who had an amazing run, mind you, but he's not getting any younger) with a ball handler/passer who fits the timeline better you are looking to compete for years to come.

@paradox The narratives I don't like the last few years are all about 'asterisks'. What if KD/Klay didn't get injured? What if the playoffs weren't in the bubble due to Covid-19? What if AD/LeBron/KD/Harden weren't injured?

You play the team that's in front of you, that's it. Availability is the best ability. It's part of what makes a great team, well, great and yes, sometimes (bad) luck becomes a large factor.

More to the point, very top-heavy rosters are by definition vulnerable compared to ones that can take a twisted ankle on a starter without completely falling apart. The Bucks closed out their Conference Finals pretty much without Giannis, after all.

@testament Yep, the dude is getting a statue outside that stadium even if the team never even makes it to the playoffs for the rest of his career.

Also in this age of instant super-teams he stuck it out when he could have gone to any number of much sexier cities to have gotten himself a ton more money then won with Middleton at his side after 8 years of these guys playing - hell, practically becoming adults - together. That alone is legendary.