@Lisse24 I really wasn't speaking about you, I was explaining an actual complaint I have actually heard from several people. That being said, I don't think your problem is exclusive to Ares games. You can give people all the tools in the world and people still won't RP outside of their circles.
@faraday it baffles me, too 
@Sunny OK, I'm sorry for misrepresenting what you're trying to say.
@Sunny I'll readily admit to not truly understanding the issue that you have with Ares but I really do accept that you have a problem with Ares and that's OK! We can have a difference of opinion and I'm not criticizing you any more than you are criticizing me.
@faraday the only thing I can say is that the "big complaint" I've heard about Ares is that it doesn't work for people who passively seek RP and that some people have honest difficulties with opening up a scene that might not get used, or asking on RP request. Which... I honestly don't know how to fix for those people and it might just be that Ares games are not for them and that's OK.
@Sunny said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
For example, to encourage grid-based roleplay, you would not put in tools that allow people to skip the grid to get to RP (meetme, teleport). Instead, you offer tools to help people find their way (directions), and you bribe them with rewards for being out on that grid -- be it XP, bits of lore, whatever.
I really think that for Ares games, you can have your cake and eat it too. There's no reason why people can't sit on the grid and hang out there and have people walk around the grid and RP that way. I mean, maybe if that's what the game creators want, they can put up a "here's how you find RP on this game" post or whatever. I don't know.
To @LWhiskey 's point, I did see a lot of Euphoria's scenes were "open but..." and limited to certain rank/Navy people/job. And a lot of the scenes have been "open" for days and days and there doesn't seem to be a lot happening. I will say again and again that I think that can feel uncomfortable and confusing for people new to Ares, new to a game, or just in general. I am definitely one of those people who will not join a scene that's been going on for 6 days and hasn't had a pose in 2 and seems to be throwing a pose every 2.5 days. It just isn't my speed.
@Lemon-Fox Was your character added to the idle warning? Like, it's fine if that's your whole thing - you do you - but I don't know what this has to do with bad timing.
@Cobaltasaurus I really would stress not trying to fit your game around complaints of people who have left. It's like trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. Just remember that one person's "too fast" is another person's "too slow", and changing the way you do things on a couple of people's opinions is just going to upset other people and you'll be on this vicious cycle of asking what you did wrong.
Euphoria's idle policy is 60 days. The way Ares works is that you get warned once via post, and then when the admin runs the idle sweep again (and you still have not logged in), you get marked as "Gone" or your last will is enacted if you set one up.
People marked as 'gone' still can come back if they want to. But if you haven't logged into a game in 60 days? Ehhh, odds are you aren't coming back.
Every single game has an idle policy. I'm not sure why that would be a deterrant.
Important to note: I have absolutely no knowledge of WoT, never read the books, and am probably not the audience for your game (alas, I was kind of excited).
That being said, I do believe that any game built off an exisiting IP should stand on its own. Right now, I see there are links to other games out there, outside wiki pages, etc. I understand the world is huge - but your game is not the entire world, is it? Add wiki pages that are important to your theme. Tell us the story of your game. So the answer to "where to draw the line" would be: draw the line to where it is important to your game!
@WildBaboons You and @Vixanic might want to get on the same page then because what they said was that they are putting together the primer for people not terribly familiar with the theme.
I think the primer is a good start but it's definitely not something anybody could pick up and know about the world without having a strong familiarity of the world. Which, if you're playing to people who know & love Wheel of Time, great!
If we are talking about what should be considered normal, I don't think ares games should be any different from games on other systems. If you are in a public, open scene and there's no agreed upon limitation (work slow, etc) then poses should be anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. It's just a normal scene like in any other game.
I will forever sing Ares praises because it's the only platform where I really feel like I can be flexible with my time and posing. The logging feature is amazing, the fact that I can just instantly access my scene, etc. It's all great, I love it, and I can't thank @faraday enough because I don't think I'd be able to keep mushing if it weren't for Ares.
I prefer live scenes that take 10-15 minutes between poses. @krmbm and I will sometimes go an hour between poses during work-slow times which is a-OK with me.
I don't like scenes to last longer than a day, maybe 2-3 days, but that is about my max for interest. I can't do scenes that take weeks to finish and I'm not really able to stay in the right mind-set for scenes that only pose 1-2 times a day, but it's cool that other people can do that.
When I GM, I want my scenes to go no longer than 5-6 hours (and really, 3-4 is my comfort zone). That means I go fast and I'll say upfront: poses every 15 minutes unless you need more time, please keep things moving. But again, this is all my preference and hey, it's not for everybody and that's awesome because Ares.
So I don't know much psychology to use it in my build but I often think that people should sandbox the games/themes they want to play before they put it out there for public consumption. People always laughed and thought I was joking when I said @krmbm and I started Gray Harbor as a cowboy game - but it's true. She and I really wanted a cowboy game, we spent a lot of time developing a website, a grid, theme, etc. And while we were building, we sandboxed it, and we had fun but it wasn't anything we felt was sustainable or long-lasting.
Every so often we go back to that cowboy theme and we sandbox a story and it's great. And we go, why didn't we make a cowboy game? And then we think about long-term playability, the difficulty of incorporating inclusivity into a wild west theme and balancing "history" with what people actually want to play, and it's not great and nothing that can ever be sustained in the long run.
I think people build games and think "is this fun?" but they don't consider the "will this STAY fun?" One of the difficulties I encountered is evolving a game or a theme and keeping it interesting. How do youmake changes without upsetting the playerbase? How do you incorporate growth? What happens when you really get to the end of the story? Etc. etc.
One of the the things @krmbm and I talk about now is the cycle you indicated (opening > growing > peak > overpopulation) and how to control that. Is it possible to limit population without killing your game? How do you responsibily say "I only have capacity for 25 people" but continuously have 25 people playing because eventually 5 people will go inactive? I don't have any good answers for these questions, but it's definitely something we consider a lot.
I think you really have to dumb down a magic system for a Magicians game, which sucks because the magic in Magicians is not simple or dumbed down. I don't think going WoD build is the right move TBH but I don't have any other options.
@Cobaltasaurus Thanks. I noticed there were a lot of spies. Who are they spying on if there is no reason to be distrustful of the people on the ship?
@Cobaltasaurus could you also provide some color around how the different species interact? From the race page, it seems like it's sort of "they've been around long enough where everybody just sort of gets along" so I assume it's not thematic to be untrusting of the other species on the ship?
There are a couple of things I'm confused about and there's not a lot of detail on the wiki to answer my questions.
ETA: specifically with regards to my last question, I'm more than a little confused if we're playing a Deep Space 9 sort of game (where we are just on this spaceship and everything happens on this spaceship) or a colonization game or an Alien game, etc. It makes it difficult to figure out what concept I want to play, basically.
Thanks!
I do think you need to add SOME point of reference if you're not doing a narrative desc, such as pictures or specific aesthetics. It's hard to understand where you are if there's absolutely nothing there? But you can absolutely insert pictures in the room desc, @krmbm has done it and can probably tell you how maybe.
I have a desc in Gray Harbor that basically goes "Anyway this is Cracker Barrel and it's exactly what you would expect a Cracker Barrel to look like" lol
@Cupcake what did Marian Zimmer Bradley do?! The Arthurian saga was my favorite thing in the whole world.
@Sunny If you build it, they will.. cum?
How has nobody made this joke yet?