Best posts made by Derp

This sounds neat.

I think that AI can serve useful functions, if used as a tool and not a crutch. AI can really help you solidify grammar and specific writing practices, help you learn to engage in a conversation (especially for pick-your-second-language chatbots or whatever), and just help you get more comfortable with putting words on a screen. It won't ever really entirely replace the creativity of a storyteller, but it can help a storyteller improve their craft.

@ganymede said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

An ad hominem retort, counselor?

No more so than the original point, which was that I lacked sufficient reading comprehension to grasp her point, iirc. Missing the words <--> missing the behavior (text vs subtext) felt like a logical counterpoint. It wasn't meant as an attack on you. No more than I assume yours was an meant as an attack on me, anyway. We argue. It's what we get paid for.

That said -- to @Thenomain's point that calling out unconstructive behavior is likewise unconstructive, sure. But ignoring it also lends it tacit approval. Which is arguably worse.

As for the mechanics of Mage, who likes it, who doesn't, its level of complexity, etc, I think that it's been beaten to death, and people are firmly in their camps. We won't change minds in this thread.

I appreciate this one as a tool and reference guide. If all levels of everything could be contained in a chart, we wouldn't need any other part of the book. But given how many possible paths it can take, I challenge anyone to make another that is both somehow simpler and equally comprehensive.

@thenomain

That's such a disturbingly accurate version of the Peter Principle.

Jazz Era / Prohibition.

All the extravagance you could want, lots of seedy plots, and a bootleg culture pre-built and flourishing for that dangerous magic and weird artifacts.

@devrex and I do watch parties for this. It's been so much fun so far. I mean, yes, sometimes it can feel a bit rushed but when you're staring down the barrel of twenty books, you don't have time for one season per book. You've gotta get to the point.

ETA: And this thread is fine. WoT is big enough with enough of us knowing it that the Good TV thread would get completely drowned in short order and would require lots of spoiler warnings and such. People clicking on this thread should know what to expect.

I would play the Alien game. Huuuuge fanboy.

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I agree.
So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

I know you're trying to be cute or whatever, but this is a misuse of logical extremes, which is generally disallowed in reductio ad absurdum as being fallacious.

It's also not particularly helpful, when people are trying to make a genuine appeal for practical and reasonable change, for one of the admins in question to treat the topic so flippantly.

@rusalka said in Developing a WoD Codebase for Ares:

I don't know if you'd have to adjust the base plugins to allow for Umbral/chimerical/whatever stuff.

I mean, this could be a problem if you think about it purely from the way that MUX did it.

Fortunately, there is no need to do that. You could create just a new subsystem with commands for those things and values assigned to the character object that pulls them like any other attribute.

auspex/check

Or whatever.

Then it's just a matter of lining up the appropriate command with the appropriate data point on the character bit. Doesn't have to be in the desc plugins at all.

@three-eyed-crow said in The Wheel of Time:

@arkandel
Yeah, all the quotes about it from the cast/crew have that really weird 'we've signed an NDA, stop asking about it', too. It's a bummer, the actor's good in the role. I hope it's nothing too bad, whyever he left/was replaced, and that the new guy isn't too jarring.

In my wishful-thinking head it's because we're going full AU with a Perrin-Mat ship and the actor wasn't down for that so they had to find a new one rather than allow it to change.

But this is me being thinky and wishful or whatever.

Now that I've had coffee and the 8am hour is ready to be a thing, I can maybe sound less cranky. Maybe. We shall see!

@silver said:

The ability to hit +where and tell where everybody is regardless of whether they'd like their location known is easily abused.

Most things in a MUSH are easily abused, depending on what one's definition of what abuse is. Is using a coded system to determine where players are currently RPing at abuse? And if people are somehow abusing it, is allowing players a way to bypass the system the best alternative?

If people have the option to use Unfindable and they are choosing to use it, that says something about what their situation is. A good question might be: Why do you require them to be known at all times?

You could just as easily as this from another angle. If you're out RPing in some sort of public space, why should players be able to hide from that? Again, I dislike the flag in general, but if it's going to be used, I would prefer it to be used on rooms, rather than players, basically for this specific reason. If you're out in public, you're out in public. You're not hiding from anyone, and anyone can come up on you.

If the concern is that too many people are Unfindable and no one can tell where any RP is going on, that points to a larger cultural problem on the game. These problems start at the top. Punching down at individual players is not how you solve those.

It's not punching down at individual players when it's a blanket policy that applies to all players evenly.

Unfindable is not the same as Dark. It's more akin to taking your phone number off of the telemarketer list.

I'm not really sure where you were going with this one, so I'm not sure how to reply to it. Can you elaborate on what you mean? It might be too early, or I might be undercaffeinated, but I'm drawing a non-sequitur here, and I can't help but feel that there's something here that's worth discussion, I just can't find what it is.

I really can't think of a reason to demand that people remain findable at all times except if you just have to know where specific people are without letting them know you're checking on that.

Alright, here's an example: Player A and Player B are hanging out at the Waffle House. Player A and Player B are both set unfindable. A couple of people decide to get together for a scene at the waffle house, because the +where shows that there's nobody there that they'll be disturbing, or because they want a quiet scene. So Players C and D show up, only to find that, lo and behold, A and B are there already. So they made a plan, got together, and then had to change that plan because A and B are using commands to bypass the code that specifically tells them if there are people at a place. This is why I would require players in public, non-private build areas to remain findable at all times. An unfindable room will hide you if you have a private build going, you don't need to set yourself unfindable when in a public grid space.

@helloraptor said:

I'm pretty sure I heard that if it's legitimate harassment that a MU*ers charobject has ways of protecting itself.

They do. Like pagelock. I think I might have even mentioned that one above. Setting a player unfindable, however, applies that to all players, not just creepy stalkers.

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@wizz said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"We've got moderators, but we don't want to moderate, but there's a still a problem" is the conversation that is still happening like five months after I went back to occasional lurking?

As I've stated, I don't mind moderating, [but] I also need consistency and support from my fellow moderators. And there have been (for the sake of transparency) days where I have gone to them, pointed at something, and said: "I want to moderate this." and received a sort of 'eh, I think it's fine.' in return.

This is kind of what many of us are seeing, too. We have mods. But the mods don't have a consistent message about their ability or desire to mod. Gany is cool with tyranny for the sake of peace, Auspice is cool with modding, but Ark seems to be kind of wibbly and dragging his feet about it, and less is done than what many of us think is even a reasonable middle ground of moderation.

That is kind of a problem. Because, like or not, you guys are in that position, and some stuff needs to happen there. Not saying that you aren't discussing it or whatnot, but the rest of us out here without those powers are seeing a pretty inconsistent message about it. Ark might not like that part, but that's part of the job.

And it is a job. But it doesn't have to be a 24/7 one. Post rules. Enforce rules. Impose consequences, at least mostly consistently, for breaking the rules (beyond dragging threads into the Pit because people don't care about standards of behavior if we just throw things into the mud pit after they get mud everywhere else anyway).

Oh good not a double post!

Also also:

You could actually create a whole new file under the same root command. So you could tie it into 'look' and just add certain conditions, and then put that file somewhere in the .gitignore

So that it doesn't get the auto-updates from Ares.

So you could do like:

look/auspex

And then in your new file you could create something like:

cmd.root_is?(look), cmd.switch_is?(Auspex)

And since it's in the same -- class? I forget which one. I think it might be class. I'd have to double check. It'll just pull it automagically but keep them in different files.

Or something like that. I forget the exact details because it's been a minute and I'm rusty but there is a way to put your custom stuff in a place where the base Ares stuff won't cry but also tie it into base Ares stuff.

@arkandel said in The Wheel of Time:

@derp I'm too big a purist to be okay with them changing any of the book relationships, dammit.

By the way I thought they handled the gay (bi?) Warders scene pretty well. No big deal about it, it flowed organically.

The one at the inn, too, where Rand was all, "If I wanted a man I could do better than Mat."

@Thenomain

Not trying to prove you wrong. I legitimately disagree with your premise and think that it's a somewhat narrow reading of what is a perfectly thematic mechanic.

Re: ad threads -- Fate's Harvest. It had a couple of actual reviews, and turned into pages and pages of people bitching in full panic mode about Spider, and YET ANOTHER retelling of all the stories. Nobody was talking about the game itself. So much so that I made a Spider thread in the HP and asked people to keep it there, and leave the ad thread for game discussions.

And people lost their shit about that, too.

So I've seen a couple of comments now to the effect of 'Ugh, Ruby is such a pain and so hard to program in', and admittedly I'm kind of lost on that one. Especially when it comes from people that can do MU-code and/or are working on Python for Evennia.

Python, to me, seems infinitely more finicky and picky about all of its various little whatsits and One True Right and Only Way-ism. And yet, people still think Ruby is harder?

Why? What's the deal?

Genuinely curious. I'm a ruby amateur, but I'm wondering if there's some kind of programming pitfall that I'm about to step into down the line.

@arkandel said in The Wheel of Time:

@popes said in The Wheel of Time:

My only complaint so far is from the first episode. That bow Rand was using sure as shit was not a Two Rivers Longbow. I WAS ROBBED.

Apparently there's some online outrage because the ROOFS were not THATCHED either.

@Eerie said:

I want to absorb the pros and cons of this substantive debate, but I was unable to get past this part:

@Derp said:

@Coin is often more patient with that crap than I am. >

.... Whaaaaaaaaaat? Are you made of... what, Rage, Hatred and Caffeine?

At 7am? Yes.

Also, I should elaborate. I will deal with game issues all day long, with no problems. I will be patient and courteous and polite to a fault, because I've worked in customer service and that shit is burned into my brain that's just the way I operate. We can haggle on mechanics and rules and plot ideas and game policies and I will remain happily chipper about all of it.

What I don't like is players who feel absolutely entitled to things that are granted merely by dint of the culture having accepted that this thing is for the most part alright, like bringing something extremely petty that there is a ten second solution for up as the biggest ball of drama since OMG because these people are clearly stalkers. I don't mind intervening when there's a big problem, but when people page with stuff like 'Bob just paged me and I told him last tuesday not to page me because he brought me vanilla ice cream instead of strawberry and omg how dare he that jerkface'... that's when I can be something of a monster, because my response will be:

While I appreciate that you feel this is a serious issue, I don't feel that this is a serious enough issue for staff to intervene in. This is a game about communication though a text medium, involving multiple channels of communication through various means. If you would prefer not to engage in private conversations with Bob, might I direct your attention to pagelock? That seems like it would solve many of your issues, here.

See? I'm a monster.

@krmbm

We asked for moderation to enforce some of the ideological reasons for the creation of the Pit in the first place. Arkandel said we could try it. People objected. Arkandel asked what harm there could be in at least trying it on an experimental basis, and @thatguythere said it would cost his participation.

Where is that an inaccurate summation of what is being said right now?

That said, I'm really also not super interested in being baited into yet another debate about whether enforcing the freaking spirit of the rules as they already exist (evidence: the creation of the Hog Pit) is a good idea or not. Because that's what we've been doing here so far.

We're adults. We all know full well what constitutes civil discourse, and we know how to behave in public among a group of peers. We can have different ideas, sure, and maybe sometimes some lines will be crossed. We can point that out. We can provide warnings. We can do a lot of things. Nobody is likely to ever get run out on a rail for it.

But of people don't want to do that, then what are we even doing here? This just becomes another empty discussion where the mods ask for feedback and a vocal few who want the whole board to be basically WORA block any progress, and at some point, someone has to call that out for what it is. And that's apparently me, today.

I'm not interested in having any progress we have made on getting more and better moderation get bogged down in yet another debate about definitions. Because, again, we are adults, and we tend to know what shit will fly and what won't.

If people either don't, or can't figure it out, then there is still a Hog Pit for that.