Posts made by Arkandel

@ortallus said in EPIC vs Steam:

I just don't understand where this "I don't want to have multiple launchers" thing is coming from. I mean, I've got Steam, Blizzard, EPIC and Origin already, for various reasons, and had Bethesda up until the dumpster fire that was Bethesda's handling of Fallout 76 (for the record, I enjoyed the game immensely, but the issues that came up made me walk away from the title and the company entirely, for good).

If by 'launcher' you mean 'the thing that I run to start this one game' then I don't care. I can have multiples and it won't matter to me one bit.

If a launcher is supposed to guide me into an ecosystem of games then it does matter. A lot. Especially if those games use DRM specific to that ecosystem, with the worst case scenario here being of course that if the whole thing fails what happens to the games I bought? If I purchase a physical game from a DVD I can reinstall it in a couple of years, but if the store is AWOL what are my options going to be? Granted, this is still an issue with Steam but it's proven itself to be reliable and here to stay - can everything else say the same?

To give a counter-example I did buy into gog.com's take on this but it was because they offered two things no one else seemed to. One is that they offer truly DRM-less games - you buy it, you own it - and the other was that they allowed you to migrate specific titles from Steam to theirs, so in a way that 'unlocked' past purchases I had made. That was a competitive advantage, and since they gave me something no one else was putting on sale I paid up.

If other launchers can do the same then they, too, can have my money.

This controversy happened.

https://games.slashdot.org/story/19/01/13/2017234/battlefield-5s-poor-sales-numbers-have-become-a-disaster-for-electronic-arts

I strongly doubt BF5 failed was because it placed women in WW2 battles where historically they weren't any. If it was a good game it'd have rocked the charts no matter if they had used furries manning those pillboxes... but it did fail, and that seems to be what the bad press fixated on.

@gangofdolls said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

The reasons for this are a few but in my experience of this hobby and in the games I tend to frequent, the coders tend to be a particular roster of people. Since they have a skill set that's particular, they do hold a certain amount of cards when it comes to agreeing to take or pass on a project and sometimes its time and interest but finding both can be difficult when you don't want to work with who is asking for either.

It's not just the skillset itself, it's the specificity. For example I'm not half bad at python but that doesn't mean I can just pick up a platform written in python and start writing that new combat system staff wants implemented, not without figuring out how the whole thing is structured first, picking up some small things to work myself up to bigger ones, etc.

It's a lot of upfront work.

On the issue of upfront work, as we know there are a lot of flakes in the community. That's not a black mark on anyone, it's natural for hobbyists to prioritize based on their life's circumstances at any given time... but look, unless I know you are going to be there in the long run, which the only way I can is if you have a track record showing just that, I would risk sinking weeks' worth of quite real effort - we're talking stuff companies pay decent money for - and then have you vanish in the end, leaving me with an implemented system maybe no one else wants since it was so particular to your vision.

That's a big ask.

For me it's really simple.

I've already spent a lot of money to buy games on Steam, where I have a semi-decent catalog built up over time. I also 'trust' it just because I've used it long enough I have reasons to think there won't be any surprises in the future.

Given that I don't want to have multiple launchers if I can help it, any other service wants to compete needs to be clearly superior. They need to offer me more than that. If I buy into them for a single game then the day I stop playing that game I'll stop using its launcher.

@tiredewok Read up on the rest of the thread. Or at least the last few pages.

@cupcake Here's one to grind your gears.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/great-math-mystery/

@meg said in Ideal Scene Length?:

@arkandel Yeah, I do like them organic, too. But if I am going for a length, I'd rather go for shorter rather than longer. Because I feel like if you are trying to go long, you are forcing things into the play that would never happen. Unless you have a really solid reason to hang around an unknown person for a long time (trapped in an elevator, closing on a house, etc), who here like, meets someone and spends a day with them? And scenarios where you are trapped with a new person probably just would not be fun to play, and probably should have some FF and handwave.

Oh agreed. And for some players there is no patience; if there is a suspicion of rapport, of a romantic match or political agreement or they are playing with someone they know and like OOC they keep pushing it to go longer even when there's no IC reason for it. The easy marker for such a scenario is when a significant portion of a scene is about one topic ("gee, the Prince is such a tyrant, amirite?") and then it's about something else ("I need a new armor, can you make one for me?") when it could warrant a second meeting.

That's how you burn out on people, too. I won't say I haven't had partners I seemed to spend 90% of my time scening with because I have because they were that good, but that's not the norm. If I get to the point I want to do other scenes and can't we're gonna need to have a (hopefully friendly) OOC chat.

Mostly I have found short and sweet is a really good way to lay a foundation, without really knowing what the foundation is? Letting it build from there in little bits. (Or even when I do have a pre-planned relationship, like Teagan/Sebastian being apped in as pals. It feels more real if we develop that relationship in short scenes where we aren't stretching it to weird places.)

Agreed, with a caveat: People vanish, and activity varies. Hey, those were two caveats! But to expand:

One of my faults (I have some, don't gasp now) is I sometimes spend too much time building things up, both with my PCs and PrPs. So while that can be perfectly enjoyable for all parties MUSHers are a fickle bunch and they can stop logging on, which can leave things feel a bit... wasted. LIke it was still fun while it lasted but it'd sure have been nice to have seen the end of that plot, y'know?

The other thing is activity. Let's say I play three times as much as you do because you have a life, so we start building a story up that could end up with our werewolf PCs making a pack together - yay! But every time you log in I unload a shitload of stuff that I've been doing, PrPs I took part in, NPCs my character encountered so that building a foundation is genuinely complicated. Every scene can feel like it's catching up to something instead of building up toward something.

@auspice I don't think their is a problem with that.

@meg said in Ideal Scene Length?:

I find that 'meet and greet' first scenes never go anywhere, and I prefer to keep those like, shorter. If this is the first time our characters are meeting, I'd rather something short and sweet. Then the next time we put them together, maybe a bit longer. Or if they click, a lot longer! Maybe they end up gushing about

I think I like meet and greets especially if they are organic and players invest in them.

To be clear about what I mean - 'organic' not in the way that's in the flow of RP since obviously there is no flow yet as you're just IC meeting for the first time. What it does mean is there's no agenda about it; I'm not meeting a character pre-determined between us to be my PC's love of his life, or a future coterie buddy or whatever but instead it's a blank slate and we're just exploring the chemistry and possibilities between them. That is a great setup, IMHO, and even more so if I don't even know who the other player is. For example I had a pretty good meet-and-greet yesterday, it was fun, yet nothing 'happened' in that scene; we discussed pillows, lower back aches and what it's like to live in a small town.

But that leads to investment... and it's a real thing. Look, I get it; it's more exciting for the player to be part of that PrP where you go up against the Goblin King or you're meeting the Prince for the first time instead of a random Joe at a cafeteria, but if you don't pour some effort and do more than pose about the weather then no big surprise there, the scene is going to be boring. The normal rules of RP still apply whether it's a 'throwaway' scene or not; we need to give the other person something to throw back at us, push the boundaries a little bit, build up some rapport.

If I show up and have my guy do the RP equivalent of staring at his phone half the time then yeah, the meet and greet will suck - but it's because I suck.

I really thought this thread would catch on! Shows what I know.

I started The Kominsky Method on Netflix yesterday just to watch something during supper without expecting to finish the first episode. I ended up binge watching the whole thing.

Damn but those old farts made me give a damn about them, their family drama and their friendships really fast.

Might as well bump it for Spirit Lake like the other cool kids.

@lisse24 I consider any scene under an hour to be very short, and the threshold between 'normal' while 'okay this is getting long' is around 2.5 hours.

But time is only one metric, the other being pace. Without account for pose length which can vary based on how fast people type, there are scenes that can maintain a tempo of around a pose every 10-15 minutes (which I consider ideal) while others can take while longer.

So I can be in a RP that feels very full and meaty for two hours because so much happened in it and there were a lot of exchanges going back and forth with my partner(s) and others where we play for three hours and barely got past the initial pleasantries because it's so slow.

@saosmash Also let's not discount the platform itself. A lot of the positive comments I've read the last 24 hours came from people who hadn't used Ares before but were very pleasantly surprised at the facilities it offered - a web-based CGen, notifications and forums readable on a browser, lots of ways to create and join scenes, an automated combat system, etc.

That counts too.

Any non-8 bit inspired RPGs or such games you guys can recommend for the Nintendo Switch?

I've a new one but for whatever reason games like Mario Odyssey just don't do it for me for long. Or I can happily play Kart in local mode but I'm not really into that kind of style of game overall.

I see nothing wrong here. Sure, staff could have made it more clear they were only going to open the game for that many characters, but they never said otherwise either, and it's not like anyone invested weeks pouring hopes and dreams into a character for nothing.

Then again no one attacked them over it either. It's fine to express disappointment, and those who did were pretty civil about it.

It is interesting though this game got so popular so fast where others not quite unlike it didn't.

@tyche Please stop trolling.

@zombiegenesis said in Good TV:

@arkandel I'll say this for the new Trek movies; I thought the cast had decent chemistry. They still pale when compared to the TOS movies but I enjoyed them more than most of the TNG movies.

Oh I enjoyed them for the most part - as movies. They entertained me. If I was judging them as space opera, generic sci-fi or just on the merit of what was on the screen they'd have been fine; flawed, but I'd pay a ticket to watch them.

They are just not Star Trek. Obviously this is a subjective issue but what Trek means is overcoming problems through intellect, logic and relying on multiple individuals you trust as a team to overcome obstacles and not just shooting your way out of them. There wasn't one time I thought James T. Kirk was brilliant, pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat by coming up with a plan no one had seen coming; I saw a guy who rode motorcycles and shot at evil aliens.

There's still lots to like about that, but it ain't Trek - for me.

Now Star Trek Discovery is a different beast. I quite enjoy it as well, even if after its first two episodes I wasn't so sure. But that's definitely Trek.

@aerianyx said in Good TV:

I can't say enough good stuff about it.

What I always loved about sci-fi is that it's not about lasers and giant monsters (at least for me). That's just a filler, and it's what the new movie versions of Star Trek somehow managed to miss completely. They just didn't get it.

Science fiction is about examining aspects of humanity in a vacuum by putting them on show through viewpoints that don't exist. Gender equality in a society completely different than ours, addictions to things we don't possess yet, discrimination over traits not found in our species, figuring out how to coexist with cultures absurdly different than ours.

Orville does this well. Not only is your colleague a slug-like thing but you commiserate with them over your dating woes. They are as dumb as you are, they hate going to work in the morning as much as you do, they make idiotic jokes and don't have it together any more than you do.

That's amazing stuff.

Orville. It's everything Star Trek used to be, focusing on diplomacy and meeting weird races to solve convoluted diplomatic emergencies which reflect on real life issues... plus 12 year old boy humor.

He refuses to make time for the sexual event!