Posts made by Derp

@Thenomain said in Fate's Harvest BETA Live (Full Open Soon):

I don't read the Hog Pit

And that makes crap-talking a player in a game's advertisement thread appropriate... how, exactly? There is a place for that. Ad threads are not the place for that. Please stop, and take it to where it's appropriate. We aren't even supposed to badmouth a -game- in the Ad Thread, from what I've seen about Fallen World's, because it detracts from the overall point of the topic. The Hog Pit exists for a reason. I don't care how much academia is involved with the conversation, it's still a Hog Pit topic.

@ThatGuyThere said in Identifying Major Issues:

How does requiring an e-mail do anything to help with ban reliability if anything it would make them less reliable.

Neither is wholly reliable. But at the end of the day, banning someone based off of e-mail also guarantees that spouses/roommates don't get banned as well because of one person's bad behavior, as @surreality mentioned earlier. If someone is really determined, they'll find a way, but they are a significant minority.

Or as I like to it, see which of my 'friends' are stupid button.

I mean, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is I don't have to remember fifty thousand logins and passwords and crap when I can use one app to log in to all of those things. Plus, it helps me connect to stuff. I have my Spotify, MyFitnessPal, and some other stuff all connected through my Facebook. You think that's stupid, I think people who think that's stupid are overly paranoid.

I mean, really, what is the worst that can happen if someone manages to get your e-mail, or even your facebook account? We have spam filters and block buttons for a reason. If you think someone can do some major damage with an e-mail address, I would say good luck on this whole 'internet' thing.

@Misadventure said in CofD and Professional Training:

Make each area of craft the skill applies to past a first into a cheap Merit. Since we are too lazy to deal with multiple crafts, melee weapons, vehicles, sciences, etc.

Or require specialties for areas of focus. Maybe not super better, but still a way to do it.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

Look at how freely people share things related to their real identity in the most silly and trivial of ways.

Click here to login with Facebook.

This conversation is great and all, but it's now two pages deep about a single player, and not about the game.

So I have created a new thread in the Hog Pit where you can bitch about Spider and share stories or whatever to your heart's content, and we can get back to talking about the game as a whole.

Thanks.

Derp, aka K2, Fate's Harvest Staffer.

@surreality

I have no horse in this race. If Gisa is spider, she is behaving herself, and that's all I care about.

But can we maybe take Spider related anecdotes to a different thread so we can maybe focus on the game as a whole in this one, please and thank you? I'm sure if people really care they can follow it there.

@Misadventure said in Identifying Major Issues:

Needing emails? Then generate a burner email for the player and give them the password.

No.

I mean, you can, if you want, but this is just the epitome of lazy on the part of the player. I expect players to be able to handle certain things themselves, like what @surreality put above. There is a certain baseline below which I will not coddle people. If you cannot be bothered, neither can I.

@ThatGuyThere said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Derp
Hate to break it to you but you don't have to give google a phone number to get an account. I have a gmail account and have never given them a phone number.

Hate to break it to you, but if you create a new account, you either have to give them a phone number or another e-mail for security purposes.

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

porn email, a business email, a general personal email, etc, which is what I do

You too?!? Brofist.

@TNP said in Fate's Harvest BETA Live (Full Open Soon):

@Ataru Changeling could be interesting. I've only played it once and haven't the slightest idea of what I might want to play. I've been reading the website and refamiliarizing myself with Changeling.

We can generally help with just about anything there. Just give us a cool concept (bad luck charm, fire dragon), etc, and we can make it work.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.

You mean except for all those @surreality listed above?

Those aren't needs. Those are tools that can be handy for the player. I've never asked a player to prove that they were who they said they were with an email address, though I can understand if someone wants to. Need? No.

So no, nothing Surreality said is a requirement. As she said, and even stressed, they are OPT IN systems. Last I checked my definitions of things, this doesn't mean "need".

In her system they are not. Her system is not all systems. I will decide, as a game owner, what I require from players who want to play. You can play the semantics game all you want to here. What a game needs from players is whatever the game owner decides the baseline is. Players can choose to join in with that or not.

Car dealerships don't need to see your identification before you buy a car, either, but good luck finding one that won't require it. They may be out there though. Happy hunting.

It's not a bar for entry.

So?

I'm serious. So what? Something not being "a bar for entry" doesn't make it a good idea. Your logic is flawed and you should feel bad, or whatever Dr. Zoidberg says,

It doesn't make it a bad idea either. Again, it depends on the goals of the game.

And if I'm running a game? Honestly, there are things I will want for my own security and game features that will require this. And if you can't trust me enough to even provide a burner e-mail for that, fine. Play elsewhere. There are other options.

Your logic is still flawed and etc. etc. I don't need your permission not to play your game (something that drives me nuts; staff, I know that I can log out, and I will decide if I'm going to or not, the ball's in your court if you're going to throw me off your game).

No. But you do need my permission to play on it in the first place. You can choose to leave at any time, but my options expand beyond 'am I going to throw you out or not'. I can choose not to let you on in the first place.

You either missed or purposefully ignored the initial point I made: Making a burner email is not in everyone's interest, nor in everyone's capabilities. Expecting people to do so to get around a system is pretty much admitting that the system is flawed.

Look, if you are so bad with technology that you have trouble making an e-mail account? These games are not for you. Your argument there is just flat out weird. If you cannot follow thise kinds of simple tasks, there is no way in hell that you will get a game system, or the complex structure of MU commands, and you damn well know it, so why are you even going there?

Also, I'm sick and tired of people demanding that trust is binary, that you either trust completely or you don't at all. This logic is bad and ... you know the rest.

Who said trust was binary? Show me. I don't recall making that argument. But someone said that trust flows from players to staff, when it in fact goes both ways.

The staff of a game are not your martyrs, and can impose requirements on you since they are incurring costs to provide you something for free. This is a perfectly reasonable requirement to be able to benefit from that.

Wow. You think you're a martyr, now. Look at you, pretending you know what that word means. I'll look impressed just for you.

Really? Because it seems more and more that staff are expected to exclude themselves from things, work in a timely manner for no compensation, and generally take all kinds of blows from players because of 'trust'. How many games keep staff pcs from having positions of power for instance? Or expect that staff gain no benefit from being staff?

There is an expectation now that staff should be less empowered than players, should sacrifice their own fun and expectations to make players happy, etc, and it's frankly bullshit. Players are not customers, a MU is not a business, and this 'the customer is always right' attitude is a bunch of crap. It's someone's digital house that you are a guest in. If you don't agree with the house rules, don't come in.

No, it's not martyring asking players to do something, but don't pretend it's because it's a) easy to get around therefore it's perfectly sensible to demand it, or b) that it's necessary for 99% of Mu* systems. It's not.

Easy to get around or not, it is a reasonable requirement. And again, the game owner decides what is necessary for their game. Players can agree or disagree.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.

You mean except for all those @surreality listed above?

It's not a bar for entry. Plenty of things require your e-mail address when signing up for an account (android phones, most things that require account creation). Sometimes, even your phone number. (Google, anyone?) This is pretty standard fare for most things now.

And if I'm running a game? Honestly, there are things I will want for my own security and game features that will require this. And if you can't trust me enough to even provide a burner e-mail for that, fine. Play elsewhere. There are other options.

The staff of a game are not your martyrs, and can impose requirements on you since they are incurring costs to provide you something for free. This is a perfectly reasonable requirement to be able to benefit from that.

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

So much this.

I'm a staffer at Fallcoast, so I'll go ahead and chime in here:

One of the problems with the idea of Metaplot, even within spheres, is that there's just too damn many people with too much xp. It'd be a ridiculous amount of overhead to try and include everyone into something like that. I, personally, don't have the time for stuff like that.

What I prefer (note: not require, simply prefer) people to do is find an area where they have fun, and then run stuff in that area. This might be some grid area, or some thematic area, etc. Essentially, I encourage people to do is find a corner of the sandbox that has sand they prefer to work with, and try and build things in it. Other people can come along and try and kick it down, or build it up, or whatever, and I'll largely stay out of your way. I can process your jobs and answer questions, and I'm happy to make some rules to try and keep everything sane and running smoothly, but when it comes to what people want to do? Do whatever makes you happy.

The flip side of this is, even with supernatural powers, you have a fairly narrow ability to change the world around you. Magic is magic, yes, but magic has limits. Werewolves have to sculpt a territory, but they still have to deal with things like competing spirits and human intrusion and mortages and shit like that. Mages can spell up a whole building, or perhaps even a block if you're super, super dedicated but it's still one building/block.

What changes are you -wanting- to make to the world? Do we mean the literal -world-? Because that's often outside the scope of what any one person, or even game group, can do. Hell, it's a hassle to make large-scale changes to one part of a city even with magic, of whatever flavor. And we do try and follow the common sense rule of 'don't do something that's gonna fuck it up for everyone else'.

Even Mages, those people who everyone hate because they can do seemingly anything, are limited in this ability. Shit, man, even archmasters, the uber-mensch of Mage, aren't going to make these kinds of changes with any kind of frequency. If they make a change to the world, it's something small. If they make a bigger change to the world (keyword: IF), they might get one in their archmagical lifetime over the game's scope, between gathering appropriate quintessence and keeping up the Pax Arcanum.

That's the reaity of the world, man. Even the supernaturals have limits. So 'impact on the world' is ... kind of confusing to me. What sorts of impacts are you looking to make? And more importantly, are they actually feasible with the resources that you have? That's the big question, there. While you might want to do something world-spanningly epic, your actual ability to do so isn't much less of a pipe dream for your average archmage than it is for your average city politician. That's just the breaks. Scale is a thing.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Derp

Cool.

Let's try to work out what works now, then. I mean, there's a reason why Fall Coast has high connect numbers in spite of I think we can agree that it's not a deeply developed game, right?

That's the thing. I don't think this is a problem. For as much as people bitch about 'just another copy of a sandbox game', those games always have players. Plenty of them. Which ones are hurting for logins?

The problem isn't, as mentioned, the games. The problem is that the people who hate that aren't a member of the target audience, which is... broad, but also very clear about what it is. And those who want the setting but not the way it's run don't want to do the logical thing and just make one.

The problem is not enough games to suit all tastes, and the easy ones to make/run are the ones that the vocal minority dislike.

That's just the nature of the beast.

@WTFE said in Identifying Major Issues:

SOMETHING HAPPENED to that player base that used to be self-starting and fun-seeking and turned them into the mewling "entitled" zombies you see today. If you don't figure out what that something was, you won't change anything. And the connected counts at MUDstats will continue to drop.

That's easy; those players matured.

It's not a trite answer. It's a real one. They got older. They got jobs. They got less time.

But importantly, their tastes also changed. Whereas before it was easy to just drop a few orbs on the outskirts of town, slay a few orcs/bugbears/cylons/sentinels/whatever and call it a day, their taste in stories matured with them. They wanted more drama, more involvement. More character building. Just more.

But that requires more setup. More investment. More time. And time is a luxury a lot of us don't have now.

So what changed in those ten or fifteen years with those players? Their age. Their connectedness to information. Their maturity.

So , I guess we need to fix that. It's easy. Recruit the younglings that have no time or lives but also have a level of skill and facility with writing that will please our aging population. Cake.

@WTFE said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Rook said in Identifying Major Issues:

@WTFE said:

Players are enjoined to run plots, but only if the plots don't in any way, shape or form touch the grid in the slightest. So your PrPs are fine so long as they have zero noticeable impact on the setting!

So I read this and think to myself, when I was building and advertising Umbral Shards as a game entirely designed to be modified, changed and built out by the players... no one was willing to either believe it or touch it with a ten foot pole... where is the draw?

I didn't try out Umbral Shards because WoD gives me hives. It has zero attraction to me as a setting and the few times I tried it out because I wanted to see if maybe there was actually something to it were sufficiently disastrous that it's not a brick wall I'll be smashing my face into any time soon ever again.

Granted, I suspect that most everyone that checked the project out was a MSB reader, so the sort of group-think that has lead WTFE to that conclusion above might be statistically prevalent amongst those that showed up. Thus, there was a lot of uncomfortable feelings when reading the intent and mission statement of the game. See, US was supposed to be entirely PRP-driven, with the locks taken off and the players trusted to not only do dangerous things, but game-changing things. That was the entire dream!

And then there's this: "PrP-only" reads to me as "staff doesn't give a shit". At this stage, I may as well play over IRC for all the difference a game server makes.

So, in all seriousness, is there anything that actually does please you? All I ever see from your posts, even here in the mildly constructive area, is whining and vitriol about how this thing is shit, or that thing is shit, and you hate the following three things, even if they're literal opposites of each other. Is there anything that you don't hate, other than, I dunno, Chinese culture, exotic alcohol, and math? Because I'm starting to think that maybe MU's in general just aren'r your thing.

What would you actually like to see?

@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:

@HelloProject Honestly, I think a guideline doc like that, while it takes a lot of work to develop, is a huge help later down the line.

I know I wanted to do a lot of 'contribute content' things; each of those would need its own basic design guidelines and a walkthrough to help people see the easiest/best way to make sure it worked, was within reasonable power ranges, etc. etc. depending on what it was, along with any relevant best practices.

The closest we seem to see to something like this as a common thing in terms of most games is the build guidelines, if there are any. I'd say the majority of games have them, at least in my experience. Usually there's a walkthrough, the basic essentials, and a rough style guide.

Just having that sort of resource available for all kinds of content someone could contribute (NPCs, creatures, magic items, new powers, whatever) would go a long way to enabling people to add things to the game that fit in nicely without breaking all the things.

I think this is a good idea... sort of. Yes, I see the benefits, but I also see this pitfall: MU's, unlike most things with a GDD, are living, breathing, constantly evolving things. They aren't static, and are never 'finished'. This sort of document doesn't really work for them. The game itself, the systems, the rules, even the people that run it, none of these things exist in stasis. How do you create a complete and workable GDD for something that is literally designed to be changed, tweaked, tinkered, and toyed with?

@Coin said in CofD and Professional Training:

@ThatOneDude said in CofD and Professional Training:

It's weird the concern of 9again and Rote when you can stack specialties. Now granted rote is pretty slick but with PT you burn a WP which in a lot of situations isn't ideal for extended periods of time.

9again is pretty cool but on the probability scale adding dice to normal rolls is most likely more overpowered, more so at the lower levels of a dice roll (number of dice).

So for example. If we use firearms as an example and my character has stats like: Dex 2 and Firearms 2 that gives me a total of 4 dice with no tilts lowering the pool.

If I spend 5 XP to build up specialties related to firearms (Pistols, Revolvers, Colt 45, Antiques, and Aimed Shot). Now in a combat situation with my trusty antique colt 45 my dice pull can be 2 + 2 + 5 + 3 (add willpower) for 12 total dice which has a probability of about 35% - 39% chance of an exceptional success (5 successes) vs 2 + 2 w/rote (spend a WP) for a 4% - 5% chance of an exceptional success. Again that's showing the same XP cost.

Granted more dice with rote will give you significant gains but the biggest bang for your buck really is adding dice to increase probability.

Again with this ridiculously stupid misconceptions of how stacking specialties works. Oy vey.

You keep saying this, @Coin, but even the folks over at Onyx Path are saying that specialties work exactly as @ThatOneDude said above. You can create house rules for your games about it, if you want, but dude, that is the way they are intended to work. That's not a "ridiculously stupid interpretation", that's an interpretation from the people who made the thing themselves.

@Rook said in Identifying Major Issues:

I want to say here that I think that a lot of games are friend-boxes, not run like a business like many of the playerbase would prefer.

Here is where I have to disagree with you. As a current staffer on two moderate-sized games, I've seen players that I would have considered problems before, but the problem comes in two parts:

Part one, Section A -- The people who end up complaining about these people are in and of themselves guilty of some major crap. Take for example our legendary 'Creeper Player'. In many of these that I have investigated, the person doing the complaining to staff has been going along with what our supposed creeper is throwing out there, laughing and making the doe-eyes and egging it on themselves. I will not punish a player for taking actions that he thought were acceptable by another player, period. If he has no reason to believe that his actions are unwelcome, and he's taking his cues from another person/people (often people, plural), and nobody has given him the slightest indication that this is unwelcome? I'm not your momma. Talk to the guy. Let them know that you aren't comfortable with it. Don't lead them on further. But I absolutely will not punish someone for doing something that they had no indication was out of bounds.

Part one, Section B -- If there are other players out there having a problem they're largely unwilling to speak up. Unwilling to file complaints, unwilling to submit logs, etc. And I'm not going to punish a player based on a rumor mill and hearsay, either. I don't care what you claim he did, show me what he did. Your story is only one side of it, and there are other ways that it can be interpreted. Sorry if it makes you uncomfortable that staff won't take actions unless we have something logged, or similar, that we can use to say 'this right here is a definite violation of the rules', but someone 'making you feel weird' can either be a creeper player or you having a bad day and misreading something. I've seen it before. I won't be a part of crucifying a potentially innocent player because someone's gang of folks says they're a creeper, but won't show me any logs or anything for it.

TL;DR -- It goes both ways. If you want staff to do shit, then be willing to give staff what they need to do it. We don't operate on hearsay and rumors. If we did, then it sure would be a friendbox. MU's are run more professionally than you might think, and often, the distinction between 'mild' and 'extreme' isn't as brightline as you'd like to think. One person's 'extreme' is another person's 'relatively innocuous', as MSB has shown us countless times. Which brings me to:

Part 2 -- One person's 'serious problem' is another person's 'not even remotely a problem'. That's just the reality of the situation. There are some games with cultures, etc, that just aren't suited for everyone. I think that most games fall under this category. If I'm running a game? It's going to be gritty and dark and not at all rainbows and sunshine, and will deal with mature/adult themes and scenarios that other people here have been very vocal about not wanting to deal with. And that's fine. As someone up above said, games are intended for a target audience. If you're having serious issues with a game? Perhaps you are not a part of their target audience. Wherein lies the problem? You or the game?

These things just aren't as simple, and don't fall as neatly into the little boxes, as we'd like to believe on places like MSB. And games will almost always have players. Maybe not a three-page-long WHO screen, but seriously, who actually wants that? That takes significant overhead and work that most of us don't have time for. There is nothing wrong with a smaller game set for a specific target audience, but for all we come on here and talk about how that's a good thing, ,we sure do like to come up with the most cookie cutter ideas of what 'problematic stuff' is. It's counterproductive. There will always be divisions within the hobby. All we can do, realistically, is find out what works for the game we want to run, and run it that way.