Posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

It's where the allegations of 'earning it' usually come in. Do you (as staff) want a non-ideal but already IC positioned person who has taken some steps in taking up a role, or someone who hasn't done anything for it yet but who you expect will be a better fit?

Personally? I, as staff, want neither. It's basically a lose-lose proposition so I just don't do that any more. Leadership positions are all staff-run NPCs. This has pros and cons. Like I said - it's all a game of tradeoffs.

For the purposes of your thought experiment, if you're going the IC route, I think you have to look at what's best for the story. Even if there's no clear frontrunner, there has to be some way of deciding between the candidates. If you're going the OOC route, then sure - bring in whoever you feel "earned it" by whatever metric you're using. Just be prepared to deal with a lot of disgruntled players.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

'Nobody gets enough to evolve through advancement' can hamstring things a bit too much and can readily get in the way of these story arcs.

I think there's an important distinction between IC advancement as a natural progression of the character and OOC advancement as something you "earn" through whatever rewards system the game creates.

For example - say that the Captain gets killed and somebody needs to be promoted to take their place. IC advancement would be based on some logical IC criteria - time in rank, political achievements, whatever. That's a very different metric than you'd find on a game that values OOC advancement more, which might make the decision more based on OOC factors of who could handle the role better or who had been around longer.

Same goes for XP. Even FS3 has an XP system because people do learn new things during the course of RP. When your civilian doctor is suddenly dumped into a war zone and forced to pick up a rifle - then yeah, they're going to need to get pretty competent at shooting reasonably quickly to survive. That's a logical IC progression. But that's different than saying your already-expert pilot needs to have a carrot of getting even-more-awesome just to keep the player engaged.

Again, neither is right or wrong. Just clarifying that even a "laser story focused" system needs to provide some mechanism for advancement as part of the story. It's just the motivations for the advancement that are different. Is that still "earning" them? I dunno.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

That's why I said earlier activity is the ultimate player resource.

But without level or gear differentials, the playing field is a lot more even. If Bob and Sally are both online and want to do an adventure - they can just make up a scene that involves them both.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

you noted yourself people still find a way to compare themselves to each other and complain about it.

Yes, some amount of this is unavoidable but it's decidedly less pronounced on the games that go out of their way to avoid it. Besides my own games, I've seen this on the statless/consent games I've played on.

I wonder though how you feel about the observation made earlier in this thread - that what's earned is valued more.

That's kind of hard for me to gauge honestly. Some folks complain about the slow XP progression, but there are also a good many folks who never even bother to spend their XP because chargen let them make a character they're happy with. There are people who complain that there's no rank ladder to climb, but there are also people who say how refreshing it is that everybody's on a level playing field and there are no FC bottlenecks or PCs lording their IC position over others. For those who do play and enjoy it, the achievements are the stories they get to partake in ("remember the time when we...") not the points they got out of it.

I don't really have a better answer than 'to each their own', I guess.

Side note - it's FS3 not FS. Faraday's Simple Skill System.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

However to truly catch up on the power curve all that matters is gear. To avoid the dino effect you mention WoW has periodic catching up events - basically when they have a big patch every few months to introduce fresh, harder content they also open a new quest nexus or vendors who hand out cheap gear just high enough to handle that content enough to farm better stuff.

In theory maybe. In practice, when I played, I was perpetually behind everyone else because they were hard-core and I was casual. The gear and/or level differential effectively made it impossible to play with my friends (at least - unless I wanted to be always dying in the first five minutes), and then it was like: what's the point? If I want to do something solo I'll go play playstation.

I don't bring this up to harp on MMOs, because that's not really what we're talking about here. My point is just that advancement/earning systems all have the same potential pitfalls: the Dino Effect, OOC jealousy, alienating casual or disconnected players (as some were talking about on the other gamification thread), and other unintended consequences. I'm not saying any game is wrong for using these things. Like @Apos said, everybody has to make their own value judgements as to the pros-cons, and clearly there are players who just won't play without some sort of carrot. I've just made the decision that the cons dramatically outweigh the pros from my perspective.

@magee101 That's fine. Everybody's different.

I don't play MMOs because I utterly despise the forced mechanical progression of having to start at level 1 and grind rats or chickens or whatever dumb thing just to get a moderately competent character. And forget about ever trying to catch up to my friends, who have been playing longer. Even with the bonus rested XP or whatever, it's the Dino Effect on a massive scale. I hate it.

I play Minecraft with my kids, but I don't particularly enjoy it because building/creating feels utterly pointless to me.

That doesn't mean either is bad though, as millions of players who do play those games illustrate. It just means people look for different things in their games.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

I don't consider the above 'benefits'; I consider the ability to tell stories with others -- as GM, without a GM amongst players with understood parameters (adherence to policy and the system and the game reality of the setting), or GMed by either staff or players as either is willing or able -- the point of being somewhere in the first place.

That's how I feel as well. I don't want plots or ranks or skills to be behind a pay-wall; I just want a place where people (including myself) can tell stories.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be.

The behavior I want to see is players who don't need to be bribed to play the game. That's why my games have extremely minimal incentives.

Funny enough - even with those extremely minimal incentives (like getting "kills" in battle or medals for valor in missions or even meaningless cookies for scene participation), people still manage to gripe about "it's not fair - he got more than me". That sort of behavior really does not incentivize me to create more OOC incentives.

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

I think that was more because saying I mischaracterized an argument is similar to saying someone was disingenuous, so if the latter is an insult then the former would be also.

I don't want to spiral off into a grammatical debate, but mischaracterization != disingenuous. One just means I think you made a mistake - the other has synonyms like "lying, duplicitous, hypocritical". I certainly meant no offense.

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

I think this right here is the point, its not constructive and means to belittle how insulted one felt I suppose? ... at what level of words does it become unacceptable.

Yeah that's it in a nutshell right there. There was more to the insult than what I quoted, but regardless of the words it was an insult. It wasn't constructive. It wasn't civil. It was just name-calling for no better purpose than to say "shut up, your opinions aren't welcome here" -- in the specially-marked-as-constructive Game Development forum no less.

@Arkandel may believe that stuff like that makes up a "tiny, minuscule" fraction of the posts here, but that is not my experience. If this crap only happened once in a blue moon, we wouldn't be complaining about it.

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

Like, Tempest's first post that started the genosha split was probably not intended as an attack but saying, 'Hey doing this will make your game fail' whether it's right or wrong is something that's pretty likely to start a fight.

That is a pretty serious mischaracterization of why that thread was split. Sure, it started out as "hey doing this will make your game fail", but then people started chiming in with increasingly-hostile rants about how all MUSHes are basically derivative crap and the code for anything other than Arx required no effort. That's not civil. That's not even remotely constructive. And the final straw was someone calling me "tiresome and disingenuous", which may be mild by hog pit standards but is still pretty blatantly a personal attack. There's no justification for any of that in a civil debate.

The reason debates don't stay civil around here is because a good many people around here don't value civility. They have stated repeatedly that they'd rather the whole forum be gloves-off. There's really no incentive for them to even try to maintain civility in the non-pit sections of the forum, because the worst thing that happens is the thread gets moved to the pit (which is where they'd rather everything be in the first place) . How in the world is that an effective deterrent?

We do a pretty good job keeping the political flame wars to the politics board. Why can't we keep the MU flame wars to the hog pit? Because the people involved just can't be bothered to rein themselves in.

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

And I'm too old to think there is anything hip, edgy, or valuable of having a website that has a section that condones and even encourages people to be shitty to one another.

That's where I'm at.

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

How come no one has made another forum? Are there others besides TMD?

Personally? Because I took the mods at their word that the mudslinging would be confined to the hog pit. As long as they're still trying to do that, I see no value in trying to split the community in half.

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

It's a no-win situation at best. Admin just have to decide what they don't want to win.

Yeah, I mean, 21 pages of arguing later and nobody really has any good solutions. I don't think there are any. It's like any highly-polarized topic. You either pick a side and alienate the other side, or try to walk that microscopically small middle line and accept that you're going to piss of one side or the other more often than not.

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

It's not slanderous or defamatory if it's true.

Yeah, it's a fine line but I do think there's an enforceable line there somewhere.

ETA:

Like saying "this thing happened - beware" is something I haven't seen anyone object to.

The trouble is keeping it from devolving into:

"This thing happened"
"No it didn't!"
"Of course it did, you vile scumbag."
"You just have an axe to grind you lying garbage pile."
... and so on until the dumpster fire and popcorn GIFs come out.

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

I'm not sure why we as a culture/community are letting a vocal few people make us keep the hog pit around instead of making the decision that we need to be better.

Making the already-weak rules on the rest of the forums even more weak isn't a step towards getting better IMHO - it's a step towards getting worse. I don't see why we as a culture/community would want things to get more toxic unless the mods just completely threw in the towel and decided to let the whole board become gloves-off.

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

This is because we are not speaking with a unified voice here.

OK but the way it came across was Ark saying basically "This is what we are considering doing..." which has a very strong implication that you moderators had already discussed this amongst yourselves and come up with a joint solution. So to hear you and Auspice then saying completely different things is honestly a bit baffling.

ETA: It's one thing to say "Hey let's brainstorm". It's another to say "This is what the mods are planning to do - feedback?" and then see the feedback elicit "But that's not what we want to do" from the mods.

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

The idea would be to warn first, then act, other than for repeat offenses.

And @Sunny and I have expressed concerns that this approach basically gives the first instigator on a thread a free pass for mudslinging, knowing that all they're going to get is a warning. Meanwhile everyone else is (theoretically) handcuffed in their ability to respond but (in reality, based on historical evidence) will probably just escalate.

If it gets moved to the pit, where the mudslinging belongs, then those inclined to do so can at least respond. And those who don't want to see that crap don't have to look at it.

It's like graffiti. The solution to someone spraypainting your house isn't to say "hey please knock it off" and then leave the graffiti there. That's just giving them a pat on the wrist with no real consequence, and leaving your house a spraypainted mess that basically invites future graffiti.

I keep hearing different messages from @Arkandel , @Auspice and @Ganymede about how this will be handled and I think I (and others) are understandably confused. If you want to say "hey it's gonna vary by mod - deal with it" then fine. But otherwise it sounds like y'all are contradicting each other and it's confusing.

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

That's how it has been done and clearly doesn't work. We've discussed deleting the offending posts and some people are very opposed to it.

But... that's not what Ark said?

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

What we are considering doing instead is placing a warning into the thread itself ("Please stop attacking people here") and if it's not respected then we'll start deleting offending messages. If it keeps happening, well, we'll break out the banhammer to give those posters a time out.

I have the same concern @Sunny mentioned that by leaving the original post and just deleting any follow-ups it basically enables a one-time bully pass to whoever escalates first. Which seems like it would only make things more toxic, not less.

The original post needs to be nipped in the bud. That's the only way this will stop. Whether that means temporarily editing it (if nodebb allows mods to do this) to say "This post is in timeout" until the offender has time to edit it to meet the board standards, or deleting it, or moving it to the hog pit. Leaving it in the thread hasn't worked and IMHO will never work as an effective means of deterrent.

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

It's time consuming because nodebb is shit about splitting threads. Hence the idea of deleting the offending posts (which as Roz brings up, means the person being lashed out at no longer has to see it). The thread could stay intact, it's an actual consequence, and it takes up less time overall.

I thought the proposed solution was just to say "Hey knock it off" and leave the offending post until things escalated to dumpster fire levels?

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

The problem is that, like Fight Club, expecting no consequences from that is fool-hardy.

But let's not fool ourselves either. If the only "consequence" to being a jerk is a slap on the wrist like: "Hey don't be a jerk" -- then that's effectively no consequence either.

Then all you end up with is:

Faraday calls Bob all kinds of names, against forum policy.
Mod says "Be nice"
Bob still has to look at the post sitting there calling him all kinds of names but isn't supposed to respond.

Like... does anybody actually think that Bob or any of the other posters on that thread aren't going to respond to that and escalate it into a dumpster fire?

And even if they somehow manage to exert that much self-control ... what message does that send to the forum? That it's okay to break the rules as long as you were the one who did it first so nobody else can respond?

I just don't get how this leads to anywhere good.

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

Current practice makes me concerned that someone can post something very inflammatory/inappropriate and be just fine, but responses to that initial thing get swatted, leaving the original nastiness to stand.

Leaving the original nastiness to stand has another effect of basically saying "It's ok to be a jerk, as long as you're not a jerk repeatedly in the same thread." Which is.. umm.. kind of a baffling policy to be honest.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

This culture of "OMG INSULTS! INSULT! THAT OFFENDED ME! CENSOR!!!" is not healthy.

Rules of Engagement

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

I'm going to be lazy. Just imagine a facepalm GIF here.
These aren't video games or movies.

You an imagine an eyeroll GIF here then, because duh. It was an analogy. I think there are general truths to product advertising regardless of the product. And MUSHes are a product.

MUSHes are reliant on the players being excited to help BUILD the game, create stories, etc.

And for that precise reason it's kinda helpful to know whether anyone is interested in helping to build a game, create the stories, etc. before you devote six months of your life to building the thing. I still think doing polls of strangers on an antagonistic forum is maybe not the greatest way to do said research, but I'm not going to fault someone for trying.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

Can you name any, besides <insert generic multisphere WoD>?

Can you name many MUs that were "very successful" period? Do you have any evidence beyond your personal opinion that some majority of people who say "Ooh yeah I'd play the heck out of that MUSH!" in February are all: "Meh, whatever" by the time October rolls around?