Posts made by bored

@alzie Why is out of Rokugan the goal? You instantly run into a ton of issues there, because the whole game is built on the assumption of people all being clan samurai. Even ronin/BoS/imperials/etc have traditionally been pretty hard to make work. Look at the new character creation, for instance, where questions (that yield stat changes) specifically reference your clan, lord, specific bushido beliefs, etc.

Your only other well-developed option is the Burning Sands (Egyptian/Arabian styled). The world has a lot of other stuff existing distantly elsewhere (including a Europe analogue) but these places would be pretty distant.

I'd be cautious on starting to do house rules since we only have a beta. A lot of glitchy things have already been changed in the first couple updates (like the iaijutsu techs and movement), and I know there's some discussion on the forums about the razor weapons vs. armor (it's currently very game-able anyway, as you can usually choose to miss to avoid a weapon break).

Re: setting, I think setting things in the colonies might break pretty far from the core setting, and also I personally don't care much for the later stuff. Just not big on Iweko or the Spider Clan (and I think they'd be a nightmare on a MUSH). My personal inclination would be either be picking up with the new official continuity (Scorpion win coup), fishing out one of the new, slightly more metaplot-isolated settings from Imperial Histories, or doing a homebrew like I did for KK.

@auspice I mean consensus. I've never been directly involved in having anything moved because I'm not personally all that sensitive to it. But I've been in enough scraps to how the board works. In the past, it's generally happened when it was clearly getting out of hand and people could see it was clearly getting out of hand.

The problem with your method is, ok... you're having a conversation between the 3 of you and one side of the argument. Where exactly does the other side figure in? Just this alone very much suggests a policy favoring the most sensitive, most likely to be aggrieved parties. I am OK with those people having a sanctuary but I am not OK with them taking over the entirety of the board -Hog.

@auspice Sure.

But we didn't use to have independent proactive mods, we basically had group consensus 'this is a flaming shitpile, can we get it moved?' The board was essentially self-policing, just not enough for some people's tastes.

As it stands, it's far better in my mind for there to be clear guidelines and well-delineated areas for the mods to enforce if we're going to have them, not murky things where you and Ganymede just... get to decide if something is 'constructive enough.' I have nothing against you, but your individual judgments do not represent the prior spirit of group consensus.

@auspice I've been back and forth on this territory man times this thread. They're not automatically, but with more proactive moderation than in prior days, it's very easy for them to end up there. It also has a potential limiting effect, because every critic has to be wary of a 'that's not constructive!' counter-'argument' and getting their posts reported to the mods.

I don't think 'skirt the line of what constructive really means as a word, it'll probably be fine' is a good policy.

@faceless I'd be happy with that as an alternate solution too. I'm not really too picky about how we handle things, I just don't want bad reviews hidden from the public eye.

@faceless

You're clearly missing some of the context of prior conversation here and I encourage you to read the whole thread. The Hog Pit was an acceptable alternative when we had little to no moderation (really only in extreme cases) and when non-constructive content was allowed in ad threads.

The issue is that the new framework does not create a space where someone can say "This game is bad, it just is, I'm not being constructive, you can't fix it, you shouldn't even consider playing there, here's why, I repeat it's really terrible, plz no just no" and have that visible to the general public. This empowers game owners to conceal their shame because the Hog Pit is not visible to casual observers.

@thenomain All verbal grappling aside, I do feel this thread has been productive and I'm cautiously optimistic about things moving forward, yeah.

@thenomain Sure, and I agree that we can and should strive for that civility where we can.

A concern does remain for me that there's a difference between 'we should do our best to treat each other as human beings existing behind the screen' as a general goal and the potential chilling effect of 'carefully censor your posts to avoid any negative tone or content to avoid them getting sent to the pit.'

This isn't a claim that we're at that point presently, but I do feel that it's the direction where some people want to move things. It's also why I kind of focus on an alternative to Mildly Constructive, because that word seems to limit discussion, particularly in a more moderated environment. It's very easy for 'hey, be constructive' to become a rhetorical bludgeon rather than an actual appeal to civility, where people use it to attack the tone of an argument rather than attacking its content (which, when it exists, is every bit as much of a dodge as an ad hominem).

Especially when people are responding to gross abuse (ie, once more, the UH example, where there's as close to a consensus on 'these people suck' as will ever exist on this forum), an element of emotional involvement is likely and natural. Those emotions seep through and things can get heated. I think leaving some space for this is probably healthier in the long run, giving people the opportunity to express their outrage, albeit with reasonable limits.

@arkandel I'm not casting you as the villain, I just don't particularly know how it went from 'maybe we shouldn't let people be mean in ad threads' (although that's an idea I'm not even on board with because of how it makes it hard to get information) to anything else.

@Seraphim73 The Hog Pit is already opt-in, completely invisible to non-registered users (casual readers) and registered ones who don't go through a (somewhat not obvious) method to gain access to it. It's pretty contained.

The only way for there to be more containment, obviously, is acting much more quickly/aggressively/with a lower threshold to shunt 'negative' content into the Hog Pit to make it invisible. That's also part of what I'm concerned with.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I'm not sure how you got this impression from my treatment of your suggestion. I explained why I thought it was interesting to me.

From:

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I don't hear a lot of disagreement with your idea, so I can only presume that it is well-supported.

And also from how we went from ad thread rules to active mods.

@arkandel That we have mods who are empowered to go out and proactively shut down discussion and an implicitly tighter rein on Mildly Constructive, versus the old standard of... 'lol this is a trash fire, can we move it to the Hog Pit?' That we're coming up with board-wide rules that are a lot more rules-y?

I fully admit, some of this is preemptive. But I think plenty of us have been on various games and forums to understand the tone shift and some of its implications, which is why you're seeing the level of raised hackles that you are.

@thenomain On the other hand, there's a difference between expressing a viewpoint 'people have [held] about Wora for over a decade,' and somewhat passive-aggressively hammering on it while simultaneously claiming she's not actually trying to take away any of the toys. You can't bemoan toxicity existing and imply it's holding some vague population of presumably more enlightened folks (hah) from coming here, while also claiming that you're totally fine with the Hog Pit being a thing. It doesn't add up.

For me, I'm still personally not sure how we went from the original discussion about changes in the ad thread to where we are now. It feels like we weren't really consulted, like they assumed a lot more than they knew about the common opinion. And it feels like her nebulous complaints (and those of a like kind, I'm not claiming it's purely on one person) were a factor.

The current methodology, per as much as I can gather from @Ganymede's treatment of my suggestions, is 'If no person here find reason to object... then forever hold their peace.' IE, if your post gets 3 or 4 upvotes and no massive pusback, they just assume universal consent. So while there's no need to demonize, there is seemingly a procedural requirement for us to 'gang up' against her opinion, to prevent it from being assumed we share it.

I have no issue with people RPing it.

That said, if staff is doing it, they should definitely ponder the purpose and put boundaries in or structure RP in a way such that everyone is getting their escapism. So if you're going to have oppressed folk you probably ought to have stories about them earning victories too. I feel this is where most games fall down. IE, stories about class and power (L&L) mean a lot less if there's 0 chance of the peasants revolting/la revolucion/etc. If you're doing historic sexism, you better have ways to show the women defying the norms successfully, having other routes of power, etc.

Basically, it's another version of the stars vs. plebs problem, you shouldn't be recruiting human players to portray NPC-like victims, any more than you should be recruiting them to be extras next to the stars.

Looks awesome.

Glad to see another Ares game! (pirates was definitely something I thought it would be good for, too)

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I really wish you'd stop assuming that all of the dozens of people whom I've heard express concerns through the years were just "my friends". It's not accurate and it's pretty condescending.

It wasn't meant as condescending, it was just shorthand for 'all these anonymous people.' Apologies. In any case, you're speaking for some silent body that I will acknowledge exists but do not really believe has a say, via you or any other proxy, specifically because they don't participate.

We can certain disagree about all this stuff. We obviously do. I do think the idea I've put forward is constructive and works toward valuable compromise.

@Auspice

I'm not suggesting there's a rampant problem, because obviously, it's been a few days at best and things are settling. I do feel (or at least, did feel, before this thread, where a few folks have acknowledged my suggestion) that we were in a bad place where moderation was not going the right way in part because the 'Constructive'/'Hog' divide is so stark and it really seemed like the moderation was going to tend to 'when in doubt, Hog.'

For all that me and @faraday are going back and forth (probably far beyond where it's constructive in any way) I do think this thread and my prior exchanges with @ganymede have been productive and I have a more positive outlook than I came in with. The rest is just... well, people liking to talk on the internet, as ever.

@ganymede Uh, that's an amazingly lawyer-ly putting of words in my mouth, and not in a good way. Shame, <censored for the Hog Pit>, etc.

To be clear: I never wanted any of the changes in the first place, certainly not to the degree they've occurred. I expressed doubt in negative content being banished from ad threads, because that turns them into propaganda vehicles. I also saw how the wind was blowing, and have been suggesting alternatives to preserve as much as possible (ie, in one of the early discussions I suggested links from the ad threads to their review threads).

In any event, to reframe the 'experimental' changes as the status quo and therefore paint me as wanting to fundamentally change things is quite the shady crock. It also suggests @Arkandel acting in bad faith, because if the 'experiment' is really 'the way it's gonna be' and the automatic assumed status quo, well, then it's a lie.

All that said, absent the changes being reverted, I want you to do things to prevent good critical content from being banished to the Hog Pit and to maintain the nature of the board true to the way it has worked in the last several years. I am open to, if not particularly invested in, harsher moderation of personal attacks. A new section may be the most practical way of achieving that, but it is not, in itself, my desire.

@faraday

I don't want anything from you, proof wise or whatever. It's simply not good argument and I'm criticizing it as such. @ganymede coming in and sharing her view is valuable, the mysterious 'other people' are not.

Beyond that, I believe your friends exist. I don't believe they're significant, largely because I don't think they'll ever join without changes that completely redefine the forum (ie, ban the Hog Pit). So while you insist you don't want to take anything away... you say you're 'saddened' and you want these people to be able to join, but I don't see how that would happen without much harsher moderation than we even have now, which is already getting pushback.

You complain about people telling you to leave if you don't like it, about 'splintering' things. But let's be honest, you want a forum that isn't this one, a forum to suit your friends. Getting rid of people who value the board as it exists is just as splintering, probably far more so.

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

You are reading too much into it.

I don't know what that means.

For starters that 'Canon Property' thread wasn't some high-minded effort to design games, by committee or otherwise; it was just me going from reading books and thinking "hey, this would make a cool MUSH setting" to extending the same line of thought to the rest of y'all. That's all, it's all it was.

I was only using it as an example. As much as it's about theoretical settings and what might make them good, I think it fits the general category of thing that maybe @faraday would like to see? If not, I'm not sure what does.

We're hobbyists playing games, and if we can't afford to lighten up some and throw ideas on walls just for the hell of it then who can? But on top of that you never know, some might stick. A random thought you or I have can bloom into someone else's head into a fully fledged awesome MUSH... or it could just be an exercise in creativity and futility at the same time.

Lighten up from where? I don't see a ton of super-serious game design discussion. I think this is mostly what it looks like on the board, which was my point (ie, not highlighting your thread but just using it as a convenient example).

Conversely I don't know that you can produce a game through an MSB thread. The very idea of reconciling all these visions and goals, let alone personalities, is hardly promising. You'd probably have much better luck sitting in a Skype/Hangouts window with a couple of people you can work well with and hushing something out.

Well of course not, that was my point of bringing up that trope, it's one about it not working, not suggesting we need to strive to do that. But if the answer is 'go talk about it on Discord,' that does kind of undermine the usefulness of the forum for that kind of thing.

All that though doesn't mean we can't talk about stuff here just because we're aware they quite likely won't ever happen. It might. It might not. Speaking for myself though just discussing it is fun on its own, which is 90% of why I'm here.

I certainly haven't suggested people not do this. But this hits the IGU/Hog Pit problem: if it's not much more than 'stuff that's fun to chat about and has no serious value (except maybe by accident),' well, Hog clearly wins every day of the week.

@arkandel I'm not trying to be (overly) critical of them.

I agree that abstractness lifts you out of the mire of any game (and personal feelings/connection to it), but it can also lead to... Let's take the Canon Property/Setting thread. Decent amount of discussion. But to some degree it's also just 'Hey this is my favorite media' or 'this would be fun... too bad it will never happen in a million years.' IE, without the goal of actually producing a game, it's somewhat meandering.

Maybe what I'm scratching at is that the idea of a 'Wora/MSB-designed game' has always kind of been a running joke here, or at least something we understand is impractical (too many cooks, etc). Is there some kind of middle ground to those? To pure abstraction (where I'm not sure the conversation leads to much, result-wise) and 'game by committee'?

Really just thinking out loud at this point.

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Quite obviously I have not done an extensive poll of all MUSHers, but nor is it a "small handful" of people. I have heard this attitude expressed by lots of players through the years, re: WORA and MSB. There's an equal number who are all "What's MSB?" and I'm not comfortable inviting them.

I'm still gonna go with 'a bunch of my (anonymous) friends agree with me!!' is always a bad argument.

They're not relevant as long as they remain anonymous. I also doubt they'll suddenly start posting with some changes, or that they're necessarily worth hearing from if they really think we're a pack of braying jackals (as it indicates, if nothing else, that they have a poor grasp of nuance or are easily swayed by propaganda).

I have repeatedly supported a need for 1-star reviews as a PSA against toxic games (just in a different format than the current gangpile threads) and pushed back against the idea of having a "positive-only" ads thread. Don't blame me for the specific rules of engagement that I had no hand in crafting.

Sorry! Maybe I don't grasp your exact stance then, or what you're arguing for or against. It seems like we got harsher moderation than we even asked for the first time around, and maybe I'm flailing to find a cause and landing on you because you're on 'the other side.' My apologies.

I will say that if you want the 'healthy center of game-design discussion' style board... you're probably going to have to help in forging that path. The category numbers are instructive (both # of posts and density of conversation), and a lot of these threads kind of limp along with minimal interest.

@Arkandel, I've noticed, has started a few abstract 'Discuss a Thing' style threads himself, and that's a good start, although some of them may also suffer from the abstractness. I am in favor of promoting this stuff but I'm not sure how we're going to do it. What can we do here? I'm willing to help!

(sorry, this probably ignores a lot of follow up, I haven't had time to get through all the feedback etc)

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

No, I am not saying that people being rude on a forum causes people being rude on games. That's absurd. What I am saying is that a culture of negativity can bring out the worst in people instead of the best, and that attitude can spill over into games as well. Especially when it devolves into personal grudges

I still don't see it. Do you actually have any examples of an MSB-origin grudges moving to game? In my experience it's almost always the other way, where something happens on a game, and then someone calls them Hitler (for said game behavior) here. The only thing MSB helps there is that they might be able to see where each goes to play in the future.

The cases of players really being hounded, singled out, or targeted because of stuff here... isn't that mostly people who really fucking deserve it, like VA Spider, Custodius, etc? I have people who really don't like me here. Not one has ever pursued me to a game. And maybe if they found out who I was, they might avoid me or something, but it still seems like you're just talking in vague terms ('negativity', 'toxicity') and suggesting a causal link, where really it's just a reflection of the world we live/play in.

Literally nobody is saying "no bad game reviews" and literally nobody is saying "only kumbaya, rainbows and sunshine are welcome, if you have anything negative to say - zip it".

I don't think people are saying it in those words. But we've seen how the more extreme rules of moderation that you and others specifically pushed for has had the actual effect of stifling it. Again, there is a thread with important content (such as the outing of a serial sexual predator!) buried in the Hog Pit, difficult (if not impossible for a lurker) to find and associate with its game, because we decided the ad thread for a genuinely shitty game couldn't call it what it was.

You want everyone to be 100% high brow intellectuals all the time, and any trace of meanness banished to the depths. You claim you want this while still leaving space for meaningful reviews, but to that I say... are you familiar with the internet? With humanity? It's just a naive desire, and an unreasonable expectation that has an actual effect that is more stifling than you're willing to admit.

The reality is that when you talk about behavior like this, some threshold of nastiness is going to happen. You can't accuse someone of being a creeper, a cheater, a toxic game-destroyer in a nice, positive, constructive way. Nor can you do it without their friends speaking up to defend them, and the larger arguments that result occurring. It just can't be done.

Some blood will always be shed, and this is why we need the 2.0 rules, to clarify and protect a reasonable threshold of negativity where it is tied to meaningful content, while preserving some moderation rules for people who go full nastywordvomit. I have no problem with a post that just calls someone a shithead being deleted, forget moved to the Hog Pit. But at the same time, I have a BIG PROBLEM with the idea that someone will get their post calling out some corrupt dictator sent to the Hog Pit because they happened to include a couple four letter words while expressing their genuine feelings.

For every person from MUSHland I know who posts or lurks here, there are ten more who are all: "Oh hell no" because of the negativity - either witnessed first-hand or by reputation. I think that does, ultimately, undermine the credibility and the good the site can do.

I take rather severe factual issue with this. I think you're taking a small handful of your own friends who may not like posting here because of badness and then generalizing that to way more people than you have any justification to do.

When you see everyone line up to say 'Oh those horrible WORA-ites, they're just haters, I'd never post there!' as a game gets roasted here (this happened on UH), this is... just them brown-nosing staff, and usually they're just lying. Some may not be regular posters, but often are lurkers. Why else do we have the phenomenon of tons of brand new accounts and posters showing up here when something happens on game? Why do the staffers know exactly where to come and defend themselves?

Beyond that, you don't get to take all the people who don't post and claim them as evidence for your vision. Most people who don't participate are failing to do so for the same very mundane reasons only whatever % of any given hobby, game, etc goes to their forums/community site/reddit sub/whatever to post: they don't know about it, don't care, have other shit to do, etc. Not everyone is that interested in a hobby spends non-hobby time discussing the hobby, but you don't get to magically claim those people as evidence on your side.