Posts made by Arkandel

Which Game of Thrones alumni do you think will have the better career going forward?

@Ganymede Regular season Warriors. These guys don't care any more, they are too experienced to. They keep the switch for the playoffs.

There are few things scarier in basketball than the Q3 Dubs.

Being a Torontonian, I fucking hate Drake. What a miserable 'ambassador' for the city he is, showing zero class. A team lost, and he's taunting them right off the floor. Show some class.

This was quite the grueling series, only to decide which team gets decimated by the Warriors.

@Derp said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I hate this word. It feels like such a cheap copout on a way to get around something obvious: "wrongfun" is a real thing.

Yes, there is such a thing as wrongfun, and I think that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if we used it more, especially when it's not 'minor infraction that can be chalked up to quirkiness' and more 'no, you are seriously going way into the weeds with this'.

Wrongfun may be used incorrectly but there's nothing wrong with the word itself.

We're gaming. Gaming isn't there to serve an agenda; it's to have fun. That's the only relevant standard is that everyone is entertained.

It's like thumbing your nose because people are watching soap operas instead of Breaking Bad. I mean sure, there's no denying BB is a masterpiece - but so what? The value of your entertainment - what you watch (or play) - doesn't determine your own worth in any real way.

You know what really amuses me? How quickly the narrative shifts based on the most recent result.

Do the Bucks drop one game to Boston? They can't handle teams with competent bigs.

Do they crush Boston to pieces? They are the Next Big Thing and their only problem is whether they can keep this roster going forward.

Do they win game 1 then smash the Raptors on game 2? They are slight favorites to beat the unstoppable Warriors (this was even before KD was injured!). And the Raptors? They are trash, Kwahi is gone for sure.

Do the Raptors win games 3 to 5? Kawhi stays, Giannis is one-dimensional, an one-trick pony really. Is he even an MVP caliber player if he can't win in the playoffs at age 23 in his team's first playoffs run in 35 years?

Man.

@Warma-Sheen ***=To be honest this part is a month old now so I'm not sure we should be protecting it with spoiler tags any more but***

The thing about Giannis is he absolutely needs his shooters to hit those shots. It's how the entire synergy works on offense - they spread the floor and then he forces defenses to make an impossible choice; double/triple team him and accept open jumpers or spread out and get dunked on every single time?

Unless Middleton, Ilyasova, Lopez etc become the threats (and Bledsoe is a non-factor in this series, so far) the Bucks could be in trouble. But if they do...

The Land of Clichea

Do we have vegetarians or vegans in our midst?

What do you guys think about Impossible Foods and manufactured meat in general?

Let's talk food habits more under the scope of how it relates to social or health issues than just what we like to shove into our mouths.

So I'm part of this very technical team of people at work most of whom are complete introverts; nice people and easy to get along with but they don't often talk about themselves at all, don't enjoy going out for lunch, socializing, having small talk... as a result I don't know much about many of my immediate coworkers at all outside of a professional environment. It's fine, as I associate liberally with folks from other teams so it's not a big deal.

But the other day one of my team members told me he would start coming to our weekly basketball runs since they had finally made daycare arrangements for him, and asked if I could give him a ride to the court, which I was happy to do. On the way there, just to chat about something and fill the silence I asked if he was watching Game of Thrones.

He goes "yeah, but I'm not sure what they are planning to do about the prophecies from the House of the Undying. At least I hope the valonqar part will prove to be important."

Okay, what the fuck? It turns out the guy has read almost every book I like, plays D&D (wtf?) and watches the same shows. We've been working together for two years and I had no clue - and he did know, so argh, why not say something so we can bond over nerdy shit? Come oooon man! He didn't even avoid the issue, it just didn't occur to him to say anything unless directly approached about it.

@ZombieGenesis I have... no desire to watch Aladdin.

It seems summoned entirely out of nostalgia and greed. That's not a combination I'm very fond of - but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

@Sparks All I wanted was Dunc and Egg. In fact it'd be so great because the time period isn't tremendously different and the budget could be held to reasonable levels - no dragons, no grand armies crushing into each other, just the brutal realities of Westeros seen through some young eyes.

@Thenomain said in Incentives for RP:

I log into an RP game to RP.

It's a complex problem. For example in MMORPGs there are many people who want the gear raiding provides but don't like to raid. However unless they raid the gear isn't useful.

So why do they want it?

@Lotherio said in Incentives for RP:

My question is more, must everything be XP oriented incentive wise or are there other incentives that could work that are less, well, gamey to me. @Tinuviel made a great comment, it takes more work and XP is easier to hand out.

The issue here is many games (most, really) are inadvertently painting themselves into a corner by not giving any other of mechanical reward than XPs, thus making them the only reward possible.

That's often because their systems are derived from table-top systems which don't require any other progression ladders, but for MU* there are so many possibilities. Some modern games have 'action points' of one sort or other to signify how a character spends their free time, there can be resources of various kinds (which a human GM can't micromanage but a computer certainly can), etc.

So sometimes XPs are all you can give your players, but that's because you didn't build a game around the idea of anything else existing that you can reward them with.

@faraday I've found (and obviously YMMV) that the use of tools like those is cultural. In some games they are commonly employed and it's nearly a no-brainer, and in others few players even know that they exist.

One way to do it is to incentivize them. For example games like Arx explicitly make it 'profitable' to play with new people (they have a flag, basically, that offers free XPs if they +recc others).

But other times it just... happens, organically, and people use the tools coded for this purpose. I don't know why since the syntax is usually very similar and fairly simple in all those games.

@Sparks As @Thenomain often repeats like the cranky old man he is, code can't solve social issues.

The code facilitates, that's all.

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

@Ghost More amusingly, a friend of mine from MUing, about... 12 years ago? Got a cruise for two as part of a thank you from the company where she'd done some consulting.

Unless you're getting invited by friends to more vacations than average, I know the one in question and she was pretty awesome. I wonder if she's still MU*ing it out somewhere.

***=First of all I completely agree with the sentiment about Jon's parentage***

@Sparks It might even be fair to say the Doom of Valyria might be a fairly well known event in Westeros whose exact nature we - the readers/viewers - are simply not privy because it was never revealed to us.

But 300 years or so is nothing for such a major event 's cause to already have passed into legend, especially to Maesters and the like. Plus the Targaryen royalty would have certainly had it extensively documented since it's such a vital part of their past.