Best posts made by Groth

Maybe it would be better if the barely twitch legal sex appeal streams had their own category just like gaming talk shows and speed-running rather then bloat up the stream lists of individual games?

@kk

My expectation would be that rapid weather changes will harm crops that reliant on particular weather conditions whether that's hot or cold but if you have space and time, best way to find out is to just plant them and find out.

I just got strawberries going - but considering getting some berry bushes, but I need to dig out spaces for them!

I used to have blackcurrant, redcurrant and raspberry bushes. They were pretty nice since they required essentially 0 maintenance and all you needed to do was collect the ripe berries during the summer which you could then make into jam or juice.

@Arkandel said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

@Groth said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

What I am saying is that the standard for what constitutes an offense in the first place must be staff's, and that if a player violates that standard they need to take action on their own accord. No waiting for someone to file a formal complaint or to tell them what happened was too much - it's staff, not the potential victims (I don't like the term but it will do) who must determine just what 'too much' means.

So if someone took things too far, or if there was inappropriate OOC contact, then staff must absolutely get involved. Drama very, very rarely occurs because staff intervened early, it festers when they don't.

I think that even thinking of these things in terms of 'offences' and 'formal complaints' is a trap. What you have is a certain standard of behaviour and OOC atmosphere you want to maintain, and if you detect behaviour that falls short of the standard or appears harmful to the atmosphere, you'll want to talk to the people involved to make sure they're aware that you want them to change their behaviour in ways beneficial to the game.

If a player is uncomfortable with anything about the game, the goal should be for them to be comfortable with making staff aware without that being considered any sort of formal action.

@Lisse24 said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Maybe this is why I enjoy playing ghouls and thralls on vampire games. I like being the underdog that has next to nothing going for them (except the one thing if they can figure out how to leverage it), and then seeing them rise above their circumstance. It's a good story!

Losing control and having to fight your way back is a good story. This is why I don't understand the resistance to social combat. No one likes to have a character pulled from them, but allowing a system to mess your character up (without dictating how your character thinks or feels about it) is a really good dynamic to add to a story and something seen in almost every piece of fiction.

Of course, this runs on the assumption that people are on MUs to tell character-driven stories and not just look cool, and evidence tells me that assumption may be mistaken.

The dictation of how your character thinks and feels about it is what this is ultimately about though isn't it? In a robust social system your characters emotions and opinions would need to be codified and open to manipulation the same way your limbs are in physical combat and you'd have to be willing to accept the result of that.

Further to actually be meaningfully robust, this would have to be used for all non-trivial social scenes the way the combat engine has to be brought out for all non-trivial combats in order to be reasonably consistent. So instead of simply posing out a social scene in the local coffee house, you'd now declare each characters purpose and then use their social stats to determine if they develop friendship or let slip an accidental insult or what have you.

This wouldn't necessarily need to be overly cumbersome for individual players as long as it was all coded but it would like combat probably involve atleast one command per pose.

@surreality
I'm not too familiar with TinyMux but assuming it has the same database backend support that Penn has, it should be reasonably trivial since all you need to do is make it store the bbposts in the database rather then on a gameobject. It's one of those things we always talked about doing but never got around to implement since there was always other things on the to-do list.

@Sparks
If you made a functional prototype it I commend you. One of the issues with trying to do it within the classical MUSH platforms was that you would need the web forum to insert the posts in, a nice thing about using Evennia is that you can have the web part fully integrated rather then try to hack yourself into phpbb.

My biggest issue in the context of MU* tends to be from the other direction. If I'm a scene where I'm having fun and I think the other person is having fun, I have a hard time figuring out how to check their boundaries without excessive OOC.

I've had bad experiences in the past where I didn't properly check and I only learned weeks later that the scene had really bothered them and I still feel bad about that.

The most common situation for me is power posing, I know I hate when people power pose me because it forces me to either give up agency of my character, potentially in a direction that doesn't match their personality, or break the scene continuity of the poses, it sucks.

Yet at the same time even very mundane things like giving someone a hug requires some degree of power posing so what I do these days is that in all cases where it's not 100% obvious they'll go along, I'll oocly ask "Would your character go along with X'.

I wish I could just read minds and cut down on ooc chatter though.

Also, why would you even try to nag someone into a scene they don't want to do? Few people write great if they're not having fun, it's going to suck for everyone.

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@meg ur nail polish is gauche and your haircut looks like...oh wait, this isn't the hogpit

Uh.

What's the deal with haggle? Are nobles not supposed to do it, or what?

Why does a game like Arx not have more system guides?

Nobody really tells you how to /use/ any of the systems. Sure, they'll tell you "enter this command, and then do this, and you get X". Nobody is telling you 'oh yeah, you need to do x, y, and z, to actually get much out of doing this thing', even though most of the not-new players know that stuff.

I don't know if it's because the game is "competitive" or what, but people seem incredibly inclined towards keeping the 'tricks' they learn about the systems to themselves, and the only way to learn these things as a new player is "just go run face first into the wall 20 times until you figure it out".

It can be hard to maintain a guide when the system changes all the time. I don't think anyone is deliberately keeping things secret. I might compile information about the more esoteric systems later this week to put up on the unofficial wiki.

Silver and Resources are not infinite, they're rate limited by AP and AP is the one true resource that Arx runs on. However you're right that AP essentially generates silver and resources from the ether.

It would be pretty cool to have Silver and Resources being generated by the dominions (With Arx itself and its market being a special super dominion) and filter their way to the PCs in finite quantities. In the same way it would be kind of cool to have the crafting materials be generated in limited quantities and the prices to some extent be determined by the demand.

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

From my understanding, house income is...pretty insignificant.

Nobles don't get enough "allowance" to do anything with. Wow, I get 4k a week from my house. 16k a RL month. Okay. I guess it's good Arx doesn't use paper money ICly, or I'd probably be wiping my ass with my allowance.

And the houses themselves don't even really make enough to do anything with. Sure, 100k a week or whatever "seems" like a lot. (God forbid you're a smaller house. Oof.) But...with refining and stuff, the base price of materials, etc and that's like nothing. I think I spent somewhere like 300,000 silver when I picked up my character, making 3 pieces of exotic leather things? I could be remembering wrong. And that's not even...the top tier of thing. It's what, the 3rd best leather? 4th?

All the real "income" seems to come through spending AP to do things and how many PCs with the right skills do you have at your beck and call?

Which...seems a little backwards. IDK.

There is a pattern in Arx design where you have an old system that generates values on the order of X. Then a new system is designed that generates values on the order of 10X which makes the old system look kind of quaint.

This is the case for Donate and Largesse vs Modeling and this is the case of Domain income and Lifestyle vs Haggling. I don't think that's how they intend things to be, just a consequence of the new systems being experimental and not tuned to be a coherent part of the whole. Assuming they're happy with the numbers that Haggling produce, I would expect them to increase both Household income and Lifestyle expenses by about 5-10 times at the same time they implement the automated house stipend payouts etc. They're probably holding off because they have grand plans(tm) for the dominions, the backend is practically a full on Orkfia style territory mini game.

@saosmash said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

People definitely know that modeling exists, though. This is a reduction in numbers from people using the command before.

Before people could run the command in the privacy of their own homes couldn't they? It's a pretty big ask for most people to have to be at a big event to run a command.

@apos said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Yeah exactly, that's what I was getting at in my post. That the non-formula factors are much more significant than the formulas and ease of use is why we'll revamp it and not the astronomical differences in prestige so much.

I agree. What's always going to be the most significant is the ease of use and how it 'feels' to use the system. That's why most suggestions I make on the github are usability improvements. Astronomical differences in numbers become part of the feel however, it shouldn't have come as a surprise when people felt discouraged over their investments into donations/largesse when they became a drop in the ocean that is modeling prestige.

It also shouldn't surprise anyone when my character with 0's in all social skills opts to not run the modeling command because it would net nothing, which is about as well as it would go if someone with 0's in all combats tries to wrestle a bear

My concerns about AP trades ever coming back are twofold.

1. AP trades incentivize piling AP on the most efficient character in the game to make them even more efficient.
2. When you trade away your AP, you trade away your characters agency. It makes no difference if the AP comes from Alice, Bob or Charlie, it has the exact same effect either way and those characters are no longer spending AP on doing their own thing, whatever that might be.

@saosmash said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

There's no REQUIREMENT that it be at a huge event, just a bonus if it is. The only requirement is that it be in public with other humans, as opposed to in your room by yourself.

Just like there's no REQUIREMENT that you train all your skills with a Teaching 5 teacher, but if you don't you throw away 45% of your XP or 90% of the value of your outfit.

You CAN, you're ALLOWED, but does it feel good?

@mietze said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Maybe we should get rid of the leaderboards since they seem to be used as a reason to be shitty to other people and to get resentful or think that if you don't have 6s in everything that you are useless

It's my understanding that they're going to be removed and replaced by something more abstract and descriptive.

@roz said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@mietze said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Or out of fear that they are not doing it right because their skills are "too low/not good enough."

This is why I also dislike system discussions that are based on, like, a basis of "what is the absolute most efficient way to do this," because it quickly turns into "people are doing this wrong/not doing it well enough because they're doing it at less than peak efficiency." Which I don't mean as "people shouldn't crunch numbers if that's where their happiness lies" or "people should obfuscate their efficiency," but when we're talking about user engagement in a system and how to make it feel better, I think that a hyperfocus on "peak efficient way of utilizing a system" tends to actually have a negative effect on the discussion. It reduces the human element in favor of math and it gives the false impression that the math can predict how people will engage and how they'll feel about it. The math can predict a lot! Not denying that. But it very much loses the human element that is going to be the most common reaction.

I think it would help a lot as far as the constructiveness of the topic is concerned if people didn't take it as a personal insult when the math of the system is explained. Based on the fact I see statements upvoted that are trivially proven wrong by anyone with a minute to spare and the windows calculator, I can only conclude that people want to feel validated over their decisions more then they want to know how things work which isn't very helpful.

When I lay out the math for a system, it's not with the intention of telling anyone they're playing the game wrong, it's with the intent of allowing them to make informed decisions and provide the foundation I make conclusions from. If someone doesn't want to know how the systems work, then a systems discussion thread is probably not the best thread for them to be in, maybe we can make a no-spoilers version of the thread for people who don't want to know, or maybe I should start putting the math behind spoiler tags.

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

It's kind of weird to see pretty much...all of Arx's staff continue with the "oh it's just a fun minigame haha!" thing, when Prestige is tied, in significant ways, to pretty much every manner of generating resources/silver/etc.

The other thing is...it doesn't even make "social characters" valuable or useful.

Being a social character doesn't matter.

The only thing that matters is "did you model this week?" That's not really....a 'social character' thing?

Every other method of gaining prestige is light years behind modelling.

You can be a social character all you want. If you're not modelling, you're not doing anything valuable for your house.

Clout is a ridiculously dominating factor in resource generation.

Who are generating your military resources? The social characters
Who are generating your economic resources? The social characters
Who are generating your social resources? The social characters.

Saying social characters arn't doing anything valuable outside of modeling is a strange thing to say.

As far as I can tell, clout isn't doing a ton for you unless you have the prestige to go with it.

And modelling is the only way to get more than a pittance of prestige. (Invest around 500 resouces for 100k prestige or...go model for millions of prestige? Hm.)

If you want to get an idea for how clout interacts with work, you can play with this spreadsheet, just keep in mind it's misleading because outfit value does not scale linearly with silver and I havn't bothered accounting for that yet.

***NSFW content***

@sparks said in The Arx Peeve Thread:

But telling other people that their fun is "wrong"—that they need to adjust their sheet or their very concept to be more "effective" mathematically instead of playing the thing they want to play—is what staff's really not okay with.

"Oh, you need to be a combat character, social stuff isn't really useful."

"Oh, you want to do market stuff? You need to pick these specific skills, in this specific order, or else you aren't maximizing your effectiveness and XP spends; if you do anything else, you're just wrong about it."

Being pressed on those things is not usually fun for the people who are being told they're "doing it wrong", when they have a character concept they want to play. It's especially bad if it happens to someone brand-new to the game who doesn't know any better.

If you don't want people to feel pressured to optimize characters this or that way, why are the game systems built to give such massive advantages to specialized characters? Almost all Arx systems involve high base difficulties combined with massive multipliers.

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Agreed, but here's what's going against the Echo Chamber theory:

• 100+ Players
• Feedback from people who are engaging the system

Unless there is a secret channel I don't know about, there's very little talk about Arx on Arx outside of the odd panic on the info channel whenever a major change is made. As far as I'm aware, MSB is the official Arx forum and the main place Arx players talk about Arx.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

One character or player monopolizing all the attention of a particular npc is an issue that exists regardless of whether there is hanky panky involved, and is especially annoying when the player attempts to use it to throw their weight around ooc about how well connected they are. But while the sexytimes angle is and can be part of this I GUESS, I think making the issue sex instead of spotlighting is a mistake and muddies the waters.

The tricky part is that while one on one RP between an NPC and a PC is 'inefficient' use of Staff time, it's also super exhausting to do public scenes all the time and public envirements tend to prevent you from exploring a lot of the more deep interactions.

What I usually see happen a lot is that some player approaches an NPC to Explore some sort of plot hook and the Staff playing that NPC gets excited about where things are going, so they make themselves available. That can then look to outsiders like that player is getting special favors when it's really just two people enjoying RP.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I disagree that TS is always irrelevant to story. Rping out sex can have an impact on the intimacy of characters that is very difficult to replicate through simple ftb. Any kind of story can be off camera, but there is always more room to maneuver and express where you actually rp versus where you offscreen. Whether you are off camming the boning or the torture or whatever else.

In general I agree and it's the kind of argument I use to justify spending time on TS scenes for my own characters. However when it comes to NPCs I have a hard time thinking of a situation where playing the scene out is a good use of my time as Staff, esp as NPC relations should get documented so future Staff can take over.