I think I'd rather not have a PB at all vs. staff picking one for me or not otherwise having some ability to change it later.
For me, PBs are kind of malleable anyway. I try to pick out either random photos of non-famous people or people if they have some amount of fameballery its not necessarily high profile in North America. I take them as suggestions and not really gospel so highly famous PBs in any scenario kinda clashes with how my imagination is processing things.
I am totally here for cap limitations. It sucks to feel walled out of the sphere you wanted to play in temporarily but I'm not sure that feeling like Mage PC #431-9 in a sea of other PCs all clamoring to get involved in the same IG opportunities is fun, either.
There's a lot of reasons why Mage player environments get can rough but I think having more PCs than resources definitely encourages people to get tribal and exclusive.
Fair responses. I tend to be the type of player who likes to set pragmatic turn around expectations for staff responses, so if the answer to stuff getting done +req-wise is slowly then I assume that it'll be a while.
With how quickly this game does seem to be rushed into being, I do think they've done a good job of level setting. I think we have a general expectation that large population games move quickly at first because staff and players are new and its the honeymoon phase for the game. If they're doing something differently and trying to get people accustomed to something more mid-run pace, that's probably a good thing.
Out of curiosity, what is the approval wait time averaging?
So, a while back - I did ask what everyone understood to be current games up in this joint. I know, kinda lazy, yes?
Someone did constructively propose that maybe I aggregate that information. And having thought about it, I think I will. So, if you'd like to tap this thread with a game you're on and its up and running and functional with active people and staff, I would greatly appreciate it. I will also being doing a survey. I'll post it somewhere around Soapbox and try to keep it updated-ish.
I'm assuming perhaps the answer is no but is this game still around?
I attempted to connect but there was no answer from the game server and the wiki's last logged edit was going on 4 months ago, which further suggests that its come and gone. Anyone know the current status?
Belatedly so apologies if I missed this previously stated in the comments...
I personally appreciate games that set down a meta/OOG expectation for players holding positions of authority as part of the responsibility of holding the IG position. These tend to center on minimum expectations of activity. I know some people feel like this gets too close to sticky entitlement issues but I've seen more than one game gridlocked by players with high positions who disappear due to burnout or real life issues or some combination of that and other things going on. There is an element of 'do I really have the time at the pace at which this game moves to do this pretendy thing?' that players tend to evade honesty with themselves about in the excitement of the position that their future self will only see as fuel to stop logging in when the burnout hits. So, games that real talk the player's ability to really give this a shot is worth the otherwise constant churn of the pointy hat in the big chair of the week.
That said.
I've seen games that tack too far into giving the person in a role of big responsibility too much free reign in how they organize their position. There are some iron willed, in for the haul players who find this stuff their absolute jam and game staff tend to love these people because it makes their lives easier. The downside to this though is that when this player stops playing or the PC dies/retires - staff doesn't have a clue what's going on because it's all in the head or the game logs of the outgoing player who may or may not be available to explain or transition any of it and much of the very high level, sensitive, intricate information that is essential to keeping one or more huge secrets in the air and going is now officially a black box.
This isn't the fault of the exiting player and more of a game design flaw.
Relationships - Romantic, Familiar, Otherwise:
I got burned twice in this department. Once pretty badly and once wasn't that big of a deal but it was frustrating to have to RP around it like it didn't happen because I didn't know how to explain it in game. From these experiences, I tend to think that there's a self-responsibility in creating a 'dead man's switch' that kicks in if the other player ghosts or things get ugly OOG. If you keep it simple and relatively blameless(e.g. 'Oh yah, Harriet moved to Cleveland to join a slam poetry society and breed labradoodles- I hope she's happy'), then it makes easier for everyone to move on.
Spitting in public. It makes me want to vomit in public.
Bad elevator etiquette. People who carry on loud conversations on their phones or invade my personal space.
Personal space invasions in general.
People who are mean, cruel, antagonistic to serving staff at restaurants.
@thenomain said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
@gangofdolls said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
I think what you're saying is what is fun for the individual is not always fun for the game.
Yes.
I personally think that we should all be playing for the game. The more of a leadership role a character has should increase that player's awareness that what they do should net a positive toward the game's activity or other players' involvements or whatnot.
I'll be honest in that I'm not really following your line of logic here? I'm not sure what leadership roles in a game have to do with individual player awareness. At least in as much as anything I've brought up, so I'm assuming this is cross talk?
My comment is really about people who get caught up in Sunk Cost blackholes and/or thinking that that whatever it is they think they're playing this game for will be along like a late train any minute now. In the meantime, they're scaling situations that are unpleasant, toxic, tedious, etc. in service to this idea that 'it'll get better if I just hang in there/try harder....'.
Sometimes that is true. Sometimes that is definitely not true. Learning when to call it under these conditions is what I'm getting at here.
Yeah, it is. But I think there’s also a basic confusion for some people about what they think is actually fun. People will scale a lot of drama thinking they have to in order to get to the fun, not necessarily realizing that games shouldn’t be a stinky onion where of you just keep trying- the fun will show up. Or if they’re not having fun but most other people seem to be so maybe their standard is wrong. And it might be but it might not? It’s hard to get perspective when the game is a feedback loop that reinforces the wrong thing for the player in question.
It’s not meant to be dismissive. Of course there’s a certain amount of compromise and tolerance that almost anything that requires collaboration with other people. And of course there’s an individual threshold for what you consider drama beyond an acceptable limit. It’s not a matter of inflexibility; it’s not always knowing when this isn’t actually the good situation you’re hoping for. That’s the holistic point of my comment.
As I was getting into above with Theno, there can be a lot of social pressure to stick around even when there’s flags that maybe you shouldn’t. There’s a fear of missing out on things and the concern that you’re letting down your friends by quitting or voicing negative feedback if they seem relatively fine. And given that there are more examples of bad game environments than good ones, it’s often the case that people will go from one game to another thankful that it’s not as bad as the last place so by that standard it’s a good situation.
My POV is that for most people their time is limited and that even in non-game spaces people will put their limited time towards things that don’t actually serve them and learning what does or doesn’t is a process that develops over time. The individual is always the individual and free to decide what that is for them.
@lithium I see what you're saying and don't disagree. I will offer though that alternative world racism can sometimes be a problem, so I tend to review what the basis for the racism is.
Like for example, there's a general perception amongst Dwarves that Elves are bad parents because they raise their children in a communal setting and don't name their children because a child must earn its name. They don't even form a relationship with their child until they an adult. And Elves are quite certain that Dwarves are the worst because they dislike sunlight and refuse any sort of interaction where sunlight is involved. They are trying to inconvenience everyone else just because they have this seemingly strange thing about light and it won't kill them to be in the sun anyway.
I'm sure someone can find coded subtext in there somehow because I sort of wrote this on the fly but basically, the reasons fantasy races hold perceptions and assumptions about each other that could be seen as racist in the setting don't have direct analogues to real world races.
It's the fantasy settings though where Drow are black and everything dark=
evil (this has literally made zero sense to me forever because everything in nature that lives in an environment with no/little light has no pigment) and Dwarves are weird swipe at Jews, etc. that bother me. Unfortunately, a lot of original fantasy races are informed by some of this stuff.
I think it is easier though to take the pressure off when you're not dealing with real world analogues whatever the setting.
I think half the battle is getting people to recognize that it is time to go. Alot of people hang on too long out of some mix of stubborn refusal to tap out, because they think they're having fun, or because they're staying for their friends (who are often also just staying for them right back).
And for a lot of us, it takes time to hone our noses and sniffing out a situation before its gone over the edge. I'm not sure I've mastered it but I have gotten a lot better. So my reasons in no particular order.
I run into this a lot more in live action environments because there are a fair amount of RPers out there that want to explore themes that basically traffick in the oppression of another culture. Granted online isn't equal offline but I generally don't know of any game that's been improved or the theme or mechanics made better by the inclusion of racism.
Someone generally always gets hurt, often its the person trying to be the bigot as @Kanye-Qwest points out. And that's kind of the problem here: No two people are going to approach this material from the same level. When you consider that every player is coming from a different race, gender, socioeconomic class, and even countries where the context for all this is different - no two people will approach this the same way. And because of this inherent mismatch, it often causes a lot of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and refusals to RP with people and forming conclusions about the players behind the characters that, to me, becomes in for a penny and out for a pound.
Also, consider that not everyone behind a screen comes from a place of treating bigotry and racism as a character study. I'm of mixed race. And for me, games are source of escapism from those difficult aspects of my real life which is full of coded language and unconscious bias (and very aware bias) that comes with a package of living now in the United States. I really don't want to explore those themes in a game. I truly get my fill elsewhere and don't need it and I on some level don't want to labor to help others explore it. So for my money, I tend to avoid games that have these themes or if not, I tend to avoid these characters.
I may be missing out on other opportunities in terms of RP quality, perhaps but the cost of admission isn't worth the reward.
Belatedly (apologies, work travel) yin is mostly a seated practice. It goes beyond flexibility and building core strength and looks more at holding poses for 2-5 minutes that release connective tissues that go beyond muscles and gets into the joints.
Most classes I've been to tend to be quieter and often there's some kind of relaxing music going on and they turn off the lights. The studio I currently go to gets super crunchy granola on the spiritual stuff which I don't personally put a lot of energy into but I like the intent.
My best friend calls it 'Nap Yoga' which is half true, because it feels less active than a Yinyasa/Flow class. But it can be tough sometimes, when you're trying to get stuff to release that's all bound up. Getting stuffed into an airplane a lot wads up my quads and hip flexors so sometimes getting that stuff to release isn't painful but it can be intense. When I'm done with a class, you feel pretty great.
I always go to classes but I think Udaya.com and YogaAnytime has online yoga at your own pace classes. I've never used them so I don't know how good they are but they are definitely cheaper than monthly studio passes.
Question:
Much of the time when something is being reported, there's an interpersonal element to it. The dynamics of these things range from situation to situation but generally there is some kind of interpersonal thing happening that is connected to the situation - casual or resultant.
I'm keeping interpersonal kind of nebulous here because it can be a lot of things - but it centers around conflict. And interpersonal conflict is hard to legislate on a game, because there is always an element of they said/they said.
I guess for me the times when I haven't reported things, I've thought that it was my own problem and that no one was gonna care. The times that I have, I was told that 'yes the player who did this is wrong but since it only happened to you or because they didn't harm a game system, then I'm not going to get involved' or some variation on that.
I guess I'm trying to tease out when and where interpersonal situations should be reported to staff, under what circumstances, etc? Interpersonal situations aren't always about cheating. They are in fact often having nothing to do with cheating but its still having a negative affect on player morale, on a very small to large scale.
When its small (a few players affected at most)- does that warrant staff intervention? Should it?
Yin yoga has been kind of amazing for me at helping with that. It's passive long held stretches instead of the up/down/up/down of flow yoga. I have Piriformis Syndrome in my left hip from an old high-school era sports injury and running makes it angry sometimes. Yin shuts it right up.
@ganymede I didn't know that was a thing until I just googled it. The Amazon search algorithm didn't return it. What was your experience with it, if you tried it?
My penchant for running has earned me a floating kneecap. My doctor has advised that I maybe not with the running for a few weeks and to get a brace that contains one's kneecap when it wants to track out of place.
There are a lot of such devices out there, all of which look... fine? I'd prefer the band over the brace but I'm not sure the ban is necessarily going to work as well. Anyone have experience with this and have recommendations?
This feedback comes with caveat that my professional life forced me away from being able to play and I was, at the time, burned out but didn't quite understand it as such until I spent some time away. So grain of salt engaged:
FH: I didn't stay long. I was playing an Ensorcelled Mortal and struggled to find RP in general. I mostly hung out in IC bars and shop fronts joping to catch someone and most people I found were mega idle. A lot of the RP at the time seemed to be going on in places that my PC wouldn't have access to/know about as a new PC. The +event calendar was fairly active but they were events I couldn't attend and/or a time zone mismatch. Channels were friendly but the game seemed, at the time, not very sure what to do with non-Changelings PCs.
F&L: I made a mortal thaumaturge and there wasn't much to do for the template. Things were very vampire heavy (sounds like they still are). Channels were less friendly, that I recall. Not unfriendly, either. Just neutral, I guess? Staff kept encouraging me to stick around as they were trying to get some +events happening for non-vampires but I ran into the timezone issue again and I couldn't attend most of them.
Haven't played the other two.
I used to work close to the intelligence community. There are metric ton of gamers in the defense and intelligence communities. A lot of the TLAs like it when you have military experience and know what a D20 is because it means you can follow a chain of command but can also think critically.
There are a fair number of gamers who have high level clearances where you are explicitly told to never log anything on the internet in terms of hobbies, activities, or the like. If your personal computer is ever compromised, you don't want to give anyone kompromat and pretending to be a werewolf ain't the same thing as pee hookers but still, best avoided.