Posts made by Arkandel

@Ganymede said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

XP is not the problem. It's a paper tiger. It's idleness that kills game after game. This cannot be fixed via systemic changes, it requires active recruitment of STs and promoting those plots aggressively.

I concur in part and dissent in part. A game should focus on how it will keep the players occupied, first and foremost, but your advancement system is important to its longevity and continued success.

Oh I agree. But I think the importance of XP is vastly overrated and over-discussed compared to aspects of games that matter far more.

It's not unlike the debating "which city should I choose for my nWoD game?". It's still a factor but not that big a deal. Both Haunted Memories and The Reach both had very liberal XP policies, they were based in dramatically different settings yet they both drew a hell of a lot of people.

@Admiral said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

@Lisse24 Strong PrP policy and dynamic metaplot played out through individual focused microplots.

Which is buzzspeak for 'There will be a metaplot that is played out, ideally, through microplots directed at individual players or their friendship circle if they have one.'

Nothing is worse for a game than ennui. Players need to log in and feel engaged... But not pressured. I would love to have people sign up for plot-slots and just go down the list running stuff directed at them. It will require a heavier ST staff which will likely be the difficult part.

As for aspirations? They will be available but not a main focus. The xp you get from them will be less than free weekly xp. (I have not hammered out the xp policy yet. I only started working on this last night and would prefer to collaborate with others on core game mechanics and policies.)

Yes, I agree. I'm always surprised game-runners don't see this - sandbox games do not work. Plot is essential unless (or perhaps even if) you have 40-50+ players on the game to carry on momentum more organically.

If I log on and there's nothing for me to do and nothing on the horizon to fuel RP (say by checking +events) then I'll stop logging on.

XP is not the problem. It's a paper tiger. It's idleness that kills game after game. This cannot be fixed via systemic changes, it requires active recruitment of STs and promoting those plots aggressively.

@surreality said in Random funny:

@Cobaltasaurus said in Random funny:

@Arkandel out of curiosity did it work when I reported it? Cause I saw it and went "wtf" but he was still around for a day.

Ditto this. I saw the 'hide things people' go up after that iirc, but that one never ended up behind a tag despite it being the one I think I clicked.

As @Auspice said, when you flag something nodeBB doesn't pop up a notification for... some reason. So unless we manually check for flagged posts we don't see them.

I try to do that often but... life.

@Jaded I thought Sirtis died when I read it.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Thanks @mietze for looking after this, I'll do some cleaning up too.

@Roz You did, you are on MSB.

Which is silly, too, because people need to meet somewhere before they hook up/date.

There's a dark side to this hobby but it is a hobby, and people have been using common interests and activities to get to know each other since forever and a half.

@Auspice The one thing about books-versus-TV is that the budget for books is unlimited. For TV in shows like this sometimes either the special effects look crappy for what they're trying to portray or the script is written in a way that doesn't expose them.

But overall the Magicians is exceptionally well made, and the casting works on every level.

And so it begins, the new year resolution-ers are starting to hit the gym.

Today I witnessed that most typical of samples: the middle-aged guy offering unsolicited advice to people who're clearly in much better shape than he is. In this case it was a girl, which made it even better.

In Canada people are too polite to tell these idiots to fuck off, but she did end up putting her earphones back in short order so... good for her.

@Ghost Yeah, my Indian interviews have typically gone very poorly. Not that NA candidates don't lie out of their teeth in their resumes because they do, and it's often because they just dragged widgets on a GUI which was using Jenkins/Ansible behind the scenes... yet that doesn't teach them either.

The issue I've had with Indian candidates is that they tend to be trained to be extremely specialized. My most extreme example is one candidate who seemed to only know what to do with mounting file systems and configuring fstab. That's it. No matter what I'd ask her to troubleshoot her go-to was to check fstab and/or restart the system.

I don't know what Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was about ('Hollywood', probably) but I know I loved it and I couldn't stop watching until the end.

***=Also I spent the whole movie waiting to see if Brad Pitt's character would kick as much ass as it was hinted in the trailer***

@Carex Folks, many posters (myself included) browse MSB at work. Some weird stuff are okay but please practice some discretion and if you have downright NSFW images please put them behind spoiler tags.

I don't want to open a "random funny" thread and have a picture of someone masturbating in it when other people are around.

@Ghost IT is different. I interview (and hire) TechOps on a regular basis, and their education or certifications can simply get people the interview. That's it, they get to walk in.

After that it'll be all based on how they can answer technical questions, how they troubleshoot problems, if they can effectively communicate different approaches and overall show they can respond to real situations our teams face on a regular basis.

But that approach definitely doesn't fit every field.

@Tinuviel said in The Work Thread:

To continue my point, but branch out a little, that's one of the biggest problems I have with the education system I work under. We're told to teach, rather than educate, and we reward memory rather than comprehension and understanding.

The educational system in Greece was terrible in that regard. I have friends who had to study History to get into university to study completely unrelated subjects (Accounting, for example) and had to painstakingly memorize completely trivial information - including the wording on the page.

The idea was that although officially if you conveyed all of the information from the source material the grader had to award full marks for it, in practice it was safer to quote "the book" so that was the goal. I had friends who had spent a year committing to memory things they admitted they mostly forgot within a month of writing their test.

And get this - they were advised against expressing their own opinions on the same tests because, once again, it was simply safer to memorize full lists of potential answers written by respected academics and quote those.

What a magnificent system that was. I had to also study and be tested in chemistry to study Computer Science because reasons.

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

If my sister in law doesnt lay off the nagging I will batman into her room and pee on her bed. That is all.

I read that issue as well! I think that was Jean-Paul Valley though.

Oh and for all that is holy... automate some off-site backups. Don't just create a tarball of your installation and a database dump to store on the game's host itself (although do that, too, for convenience) but make sure you're downloading regular snapshots into at least one other machine - two different machines is even better.

Also to be a purist... until you've verified you can restore everything from scratch using those backups, they don't count.

@Carex said in Microsoft Azure...?:

@Derp

How does developing a game actually work? If you pay for server space do they give you a login for a shell account where you can edit the game files and such? The only MUSH I ever tried to build only lived in my harddrive.

What your monthly subscription to such services gets you is essentially your own host (a virtual server running Linux), and based on the plan you purchase a certain amount of space on its file system and CPU. Since MU* don't use much of either you typically only need a basic plan.

Once you have those you pick a code base (there are several both older and newer such as Ares or Arx-code). They will have some dependencies based on what language they're written in, where the data is stored, etc. Those can be found in their documentations.

Once you have that you follow the installation instructions and it opens a port on your host that you can use to log into your stock game. What you do after depends on your goals and your coders' technical abilities.

@Carex Try https://musoapbox.net/groups . Don't say I didn't warn you!

@Carex said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

@onigiri said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

There's an entire terrifying Hogpit thread about him.

Link? What is the Hogpit?

You are much better off not finding out. But you will.

Edit: It's a section of this forum you need to opt-in for. The rules are different there, and flames or personal attacks are acceptable (within certain limits).

@Carex It's a good idea. Although as @Derp says it's pretty affordable to run a Linux server since the hardware requirements to run a MUSH are pretty low, it also makes little sense to be paying anything upfront if what you want is to just develop a game from scratch, build a grid, try out some code bases etc before opening it to the public.