@Coin said:
@Arkandel, you essentially start from scratch. We know this will likely be unpopular, but yeah. There are exceptions, among which "if you character dies due to plot/PK, and it wasn't planned", you can transfer a certain amount of XP.
Yeah, we know it's difficult to adjudicate. But that's the idea at the moment.
Meh! I don't like that approach, but at least you know what you intend to do and you state it beforehand. 
So fair enough.
@Eerie said:
Maybe you will find that once you're playing a stigmatic garden gnome that you apped instead of a werewolf that its actually fantastic and you're having a blast, but even if you decide you'd rather play a werewolf when it reopens, at least you had fun in the interim. And this is also why we're going with two alts but not limiting it beyond that. You can also do both.
I'm too lazy to look! Are there rules in place for XP migration? I.e. your PC dies/you're bored of your PC and wish to roll a new one, do you start from scratch or do you offer alternatives?
@tragedyjones said:
Agent Carter has yet to have a bad episode (then again, it is a miniseries) and Agents of SHIELD keeps improving and powering through material in a good way.
I dunno, I quite like Agents of SHIELD (it was okay until Cap 2 came out, then it became really good), but at least after episodes 1-2 of Agent Carter I still couldn't get into it. Maybe it deserves another chance though.
Not going the TL route has one more advantage, in that it's no longer a big problem if some spheres are overpopulated and some others are deserted.
Sharing the workload aside, SHH for example decided to not have a Geist sphere for the lack of interest - which I took to mean (and they can correct me if I'm wrong) that it was a bad investment of resources to have a full sphere staff for a place which would only have a handful of players. That wouldn't have been an issue (or not as much) for a TL-less game.
For Eldritch in particular, unless the GMC Werewolf mechanics are great (as it's pretty universally agreed they were not on 1st Edition nWoD) it'll most likely be the least popular sphere on the MU. But in this case, as noted, who cares.
@Ganymede said:
If it makes you feel better, Theno, I concur with that decision.
Set reasonable alt limits. You'll be fine.
+1.
I've two rescued mutts. I like to think of their breeds as unique.
@Eerie said:
From my perspective, I think it’s really so simple that the specifics of your example don’t even really need to come into it. Essentially it’s just ‘can staff handle the needs of the current playerbase with the time that they have available to devote to the game in a way that is satisfying for most everyone involved?’
It might just be my own mileage talking although I doubt it is and that chances are other people's experiences will reflect the same thing; the "current playerbase's needs" are a fictional thing, because what overloads staff and leads them to the bottle isn't the more or less regular load of day-to-day +jobs. Those peak right as an influx of players come in for whatever reason (the game opens, an entire coterie apps at the same time, etc) but with some help from automation code for spends it's usually something an experienced admin can take care of without too much trouble. The problem, in other words, is not 90% of your players 90% of the time since they will rarely do more than ask to spend some XP or ask a question about mechanics or the such.
No, the trouble comes from the other 10% of those players, 10% of the time, when shit hits the fan. When there's a problem player ruffling people's feathers and you need to talk to those overexcited adults, when several people really, really want to be Sheriff and they are at each other's throats so you need to get to the bottom of it before the channel explodes. That sort of thing. It's the sort of situation that inevitably comes up, more so since there's so much shared baggage between games going back years. And it can't be delegated like say, plot can be to non-staff STs, it's all yours, baby.
It's not something sphere caps will help. It's not even something you can prevent - I pity @Corruption on SHH already having gotten just a glimpse of Changeling players snarling at each other, and that game hasn't even been opened for more than what, a month? I bet if you asked them they'd find most of their +job load is dealing with that crap, not people asking how the Eternal Spring 3 Contract works or whatever. Even if they had instituted a cap, unless somehow all those players happened to app late and were in a waiting list (doubtful; usually the types more likely to engage in that are by far the most involved) it'd have still happened.
Alt limits are a good idea though. However I am admittedly biased since I'm not a big alt-person myself, so there's that.
@Coin said:
Granted, @Arkandel, but that doesn't mean if the policy is implemented we won't try for something that will feel exclusionary to the least amount of people possible.
The moment sphere caps go into effect, as long as even a single person has to be excluded from a sphere they wish to play, you're already looking for the reason why it was them as opposed to someone else who did get in. To that one person it will feel exclusionary.
On the other hand the person who already has an alt - albeit in a different sphere - and wants to keep them is already included; they are part of the game, they can play.
I don't see why it's a bigger dick move to give someone the choice of where to play than to give someone else no choice that gets them playing at all.
The answer seems simple: If that person wants priority for the new sphere they can drop their first alt. It's not a dick move, any more than making someone else wait with no alts is.
No one said sphere caps are supposed to be liked.
@silentsophia said:
I do like the idea of giving priority to someone who doesn't have their 1 supernatural alt. Alt-madness tends to cause problems. Like, I dig the idea that one wants to play a variety of things but it rarely ends well.
+1. Also it's unfair if one person only wants one alt but actually has zero, and another has two.
I hate that White Wolf seems to have dropped Geist like a hot potato. I really like its themes and mechanics - plus it's the only splat in the nWoD which is truly fundamentally disorganized, so one can do away with all the drama of chasing after ranks.
Even if they offered a good conversion guide to use as a frame of reference at least. If you guys ever did feel tempted and needed help implementing the sphere please let me know.
@Darinelle said:
@Arkandel - Well, you did - but that was also a system that was theoretically "automatically applied" with fairness to all. It just - wasn't.
Once you can't trust the people running a game, run. There's absolutely nothing that systems or code can do to fix that - if @the folks running Eldritch (for example!) were jerkfaces then no sphere cap implementation would help a player they decide to screw with.
Anything we discuss has to be under the assumption of staff sanity.
@Darinelle said:
@Eerie said:
Define then hardcode an activity requirement.
Firan did this. It was extremely easy to get around, and in the end it was relatively meaningless too. It was, however, a good way for asshole staffers to pluck characters from people for no goddamn reason, like the one who booted my RL friend off his character two days after our last scene, with no warning @mail nor anything, for "weeks of inactivity."
I believe I explicitly stated that for a system like this to work it needs to be fair and it has to be applied universally - that means automatically. You don't play, you get frozen. It's not meant to solve the issue of asshole staffers because that is not solvable through code.
However since it's stated that's not an option for Eldritch, that's that.
@Coin said:
Man, @Arkandel, I like Whedon as much as the next guy, but I sure hope you-re being hyperbolic.
That sure sounds a lot like heresy to me. To the dungeon with you! You can watch Batman and Robin reruns until you come to realize the error of your ways or your mind snaps, whichever happens first.
@darksabrz said:
@Coin and @Arkandel: They're already pushing Spider-Man hard, to the point that they've already pushed back Black Panther and Captain Marvel both to make room for the wall-crawler.
At this point, it looks like the movies are rebooting Spider-Man about as often as Marvel was in the comics.
As long as they don't cram as many characters as they can into a movie. Although Whedon can pull it off, he's Whedon.
@Coin said:
Just for everyone's information, we've already decided on how many alts people can have on the game and for the nonce it's 2 alts per player, period. I say this as it seems to be relevant to people's opinions on the matter.
Alright. It's not a stretch then to predict that given Werewolf traditionally isn't as popular (but GMC could change that?), in a three-supernatural sphere game assuming an at least initial burst of popularity, you are going to end up with a number of vampire and demon placeholders PCs from players trying to skip the queue.
@Ganymede said:
But the second system introduces uncertainty. In my opinion, it's not fair, and it does not promote competition. What it does, though, is create a great deal of frustration, as teams hovering around the bottom -- but not at the bottom -- may consistently choose first or second over time.
The failing there is that it creates a race to the bottom condition; in these implementations the worst place to be is around the middle, since you are neither competing for a championship nor able to improve through getting the best players from the draft. So you get (often multiple) teams trying to purposefully tank, to lose games in order to be at the bottom of the league and thus become able to grab the big name rookies.
Obviously no solution will please everyone but the hybrid one seems best.
There is a very nasty problem you are likely to run into in that people will preemptively sign up for spheres. I.e. since they know Demon (or whatever) has a queue of 10+ which can take weeks or months to go through they'll sign up with no immediate intention of playing there, or will simply be in the sphere and just hog a spot by logging on but not actually playing.
Two potential solutions:
Allow just one (supernatural? overall?) alt. This way at least you are discouraging people who intend to play in your game at all from parking characters in its spheres.
Define then hardcode an activity requirement. It's not so hard, it's just that everyone will define it in a way that makes sense for them, so you'll need to pick one. My personal pitch is something that goes kinda like this (more refinement is needed but just to get an idea):
Yes, people can trick it but especially if you combine it with (1) you're still fine. Doing it on a weekly (rather than daily) basis makes it easier with people who for whatever reason can't play every single day from idlying out, and you can even offer warning @mails to people near the limit so they're aware they're near the limit.
There's no need to make activity requirements high or draconian, only that you make them fair and universal. Hell, you can even set vacation flags for players who warn about it in advance so their counters aren't checked.
Just some thoughts.
That's abuse!