Topics created by Arkandel

I'm wary of supporting positive reviews remaining in the ad threads if negative ones are being put elsewhere, especially with the risk the negative reviews could be hidden behind the membership wall of the Hog Pit. It might be easy to join but it isn't something a new member will know to seek out unless someone held their hand into discovering it.

I think keeping the ad threads for Q&A as well as for linking to revelant threads, whether in this subforum or the Hog Pit, is the correct course of action to avoid bias.

I found this link as one of the more recent articles about China's political pressure machine that has a lot of the stuff I mentioned and a few other examples. There's lots of material out there if you're looking for it. This just happens to have a lot of examples in one place and has more on the hotel guy that got fired.

Just in case someone wanted more examples about slighting China, emphasis on 'slight': http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/lebron-jamess-statement-on-china-was-disappointing.html

With 1.4 billion people and being more capitalist than communist in recent years, obviously there is a lot of money to be made in China so I can't imagine anything but a hands off approach to them. But that's why I think a bigger push should be made towards India, who is expected to soon surpass China in population and is less 'hostile' in relation to the US. But no country is perfect and the US has plenty of its own problems so... grain of salt and all that.

The use of sports in aiding diplomacy has a long history, though, in several different countries. So there's more to be gained than just profits with situations like these. Spreading culture and opening lines of communication that weren't there before are more valuable in the long run than they might appear.

And yeah, when you talk about any organization as big as the NBA separating politics and economics isn't realistic, especially once a focus on something draws all eyes. I don't think this situation would have been as bad if not for the current trade war or the US issues with Huawei. China is on the defensive already of all things American and if this is just another proxy battle, then the US lost handily and exposed one of its greatest weaknesses: $$$

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

Hey, at least you'd be doing it in an FS3 way. @faraday can't fault you for that, can she?

Can she?!

Yes.

Well probably, but as long as you do it the way the game is intended.

e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxo3Jy3p8zo

@Bobotron For starters, and to be honest, I'm not extremely worried about making things closer to a MU* per se just for the sake of drawing people based on the familiarity alone; if that was all that kept me from not having a grid at all I'd have spared myself a few weeks' worth of work and just wouldn't have an interactive one in-game, and let people pick them the way you describe.

But the grid is useful in retrospect. Immersion in the world is a big one, but I want to bake territories into the game from the ground up since then that opens the door to all sorts of automated resource-management options later on, which many kinds of games (L&L, Vampire, etc) could use.

To answer your question though, there is a hexagonal grid on which you can see 'neighborhoods'. On the most basic level a neighborhood is just a room that contains other rooms, which makes the interface more convenient if you want many locations geographically close to each other. So a neighborhood might be "The Eaton Mall" which contains a bunch of stores and businesses, "Casterly Rock" which again has living rooms, bedrooms, meeting rooms, etc and so on. You can see how many people are in a neighborhood right away, or mouseover one to get an image and general description as well as how many people are per location in it.

I'm currently working on the GUI to edit the grid and add custom non-interactive elements to it such as displaying roads but, more importantly, editing each hex square's properties. So the grid map could show the area around Casterly Rock is House Lannister territory - by color - and how much resource each square can produce, what its upkeep is, etc.

Games could then simply use this feature to display territory and that's it. Werewolf pack X has the light blue squares... done. It's a convenience. But if they want to they could also use the resource management for political/strategic purposes; maybe that 12,15 square of land is a copper mine, and if House Tyrell convinces the King to hand it over to them, they now increase their weekly yield of resources.

There are other advantages of coding this but they're out of scope for this answer... I hope it helped, and obviously if you have suggestions please feel free. 🙂

The Force Unleashed has a mobile version that's pretty fun.. You move your finger around in different patters for different force powers.

Beyond that, if you can increase your mouse sensitivity, you could always go the way of Elder Scrolls. Keeping things squarely in the middle and navigating with the keyboard is easy enough, and it's a good time waster.

Prey, too. I've fallen in love with that game. It's hella fun.

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@Thenomain You've mentioned in the past feeling bad when you didn't have enough evidence to kick people you knew were bad out of the game. Do you regret that decision now? Would you have done the same thing today?

It was not my decision alone, but I would have made the same decision. Had Troy or Lemuria had said that they wanted our multi game abuser removed from the game, I probably would have caved and done so. Had someone even under complete anonymity told me exactly what happened, I would have done so. It came down to punishing someone and being able to tell them why, being comfortable that I understood why, and nobody would give me that.

This is very much a "because I said so" situation, but I expect good staff to be benevolent dictators. I didn't have any sort of rule of law that I was going with; I was going with a rule of conscience.

Hell, I don't care if I don't believe that staff does THE right thing. We are human beings, we have a million personal belief systems. I want to know that they do A right thing.

This exactly for me. I'll up the difficulty on a single-player story-driven game at first, but if I find that the experience of the story is being disrupted, I'll bring that down.

CK2 and the like ... yeah. Difficulty up. I play the shit out of those games (1922 hours on CK2 according to Steam).

@Tinuviel said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

Depends on the game.

If it's more story-driven, I err towards the easier side of the spectrum (though normal difficulty is usually fine) as I don't want to be without story just because I can't beat the Firey Thresher Maws of Doom or whatever.
If it's a strategy game (big fan of Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV, for instance) I turn the difficulty way, way up. Because I hate myself and want to see what happens.

Altered Carbon, as a major inspiration for Eclipse Phase, has re-ignited THE ITCH.

luckdragoncat.jpg

@Arkandel Read WW: Rebirth instead. I don't know what the hell's going on but it is fucking awesome. Circe just popped up and opened a can of whoop-ass on two gods.

Maybe do a setup where there has to be no less than 8 and no more than 12 characters to drive a mini-faction (I dunno, are they the support for a Slayer, are they the officers of a brigade, are they the lackies of musketeers, the aids of politicians) where all the end result in in terms of the mini-faction scale, but each person has their mini-faction to RP with, and of course dealing with other mini-factions, and whatever story elements etc.

@Cupcake Oh shiiiiiiiiiiiit yes. I only saw mention on my quick Google Search to remember the Justice League for Marvel.

@Miss-Demeanor One of the most fun betas I've ever been in was for Magic Online a long time ago. For something like... I dunno, two years? They gave you free boosters every week and you just played and traded. I loved it.

It was also ran by WotC so ... fingers crossed. 🙂

So, sharing this here... Gaming podcast my buddy runs. One of the things he posts is the (edited) audio from our (once-a-month) oWoD gaming sessions: https://criticalhints.wordpress.com/

Today's is the CG for our next (Vampire) game. Dunno if that's up anyone's alley (listening to a group of people play TT...). You can hear me be an ADD mess once a month, yay! >.>

@EmmahSue

I literally buy Telepathy to at least 2 just to be able to respond to that sort of thoughtposing.

Alas, this is probably less easy if you aren't playing a PC type capable of learning it or something equivalent.

For the record we ran the scene... 8 people there, it ran pretty smoothly I think. No alt-related issues so far that I've noticed, either.

Now let's see if people take the initiative and go out to roleplay about it across sphere boundaries. 🙂