Posts made by Groth

@Arkandel said:

I'd be very interested to hear how you reconcile the statement with the fact games which offer high XP right out of the gate - such as TR - are so very popular.

It's possible to be popular despite having various shitty features. I've almost never heard anyone say anything positive about TR or Fallcoast other then the fact they're almost the only place on the internet to play nWoD Geist/Changeling/Mage/Changing Breeds etc. The fact TR/FC remains the largest non-sex MU* on record after wiping everyone's XP seems to support that the XP was in no way the killer feature.

Now if you honestly believe that XP is a killer feature, why not just start everyone at 500xp and stop pretending you care about character progression? Ask yourself, why are you doing the 1xp per week at all? What purpose does it serve?

I'm willing to bet significant amounts of money that the end result of your system in action is a game full of semi-inactive powerful alts entrenched in all spheres because there exists absolutely no reason to not do that. It'll create a game that looks big but is almost impossible to get actual scenes in.

It'll also lead to even more insular cliquishness as there's no need to go outside of your friendcircle for anything, since at any time you need any particular skillset, you or your friends can just create a new powerful alt with whatever you need.

You can't resurrect an inactive sphere by making incentives for people to reroll alts into it. You resurrect a sphere by having it run by someone that's active, passionate and able to make the players inside the sphere genuinely excited about what's going on. No amount of XP rewards is going to help there and the kind of player that joins a sphere just because they can join that sphere as someone powerful, is not the kind of person you want joining that sphere in the first place.

I think it's worthwhile to remember the reason we have XP systems in the first place. The reason that most games start you off at lvl 1 and let you progress instead of giving you everything you could ever want.

That reason is because it's the progression that most people find exciting, that journey of going from nothing and rising to power. Whenever you give 'base xp' or 'catch up xp' or whatever, you're robbing them of that experience. There is no emotional attachment to that rise of power because there never was a rise, just power.

@Arkandel said:

where alts are easily made and character death/retirement is resolved more smoothly,

My only question is why you would want there to be alt incentives. You've designed a system where alts will always be more powerful then new characters and I have a hard time imagining how you could make a game more hostile to new/casual players then that.

@tragedyjones said

I thought RfK had a +recc system as well?

RfK allowed you to claim up to 15 beats per week broken into these categories. (They don't add up to 15, 15 was the weekly cap). The various beats were mutually compatible so you could easily earn 3-4 beats from one scene if you remembered to claim them all.

You could claim up to 7 scene beats per week.
You could claim up to 3 theme beats per week. (Being particularly Ordo or Daeva or whatever)
You could claim up to 1 hosting beat per week
You could claim up to 3 aspiration beats.
You could claim up to 7 breaking point beats.
You could claim up to 3 frenzy beats.
You could claim up to 7 condition beats.
You could claim 1 beat per point of Vincilum.
You could claim up to 3 beats for placing rumors on character pages.

Additionally, you could earn up to 7 beats per week from another playing giving you a +squee.

In total this meant that the super active characters on the game earned 15-22 beats per week, not counting staff beats.

I really don't like 'catchup XP' as presumably when you first decide how much XP a player should earn per week, you pick the number you think feels good. Giving new characters truck-loads of XP can feel weird and disorienting.

I am however a fan of limiting the XP that the older characters can earn. The purpose of this is not actually to 'let the new characters catch up' but rather prevent the older characters from buying literally everything. As you've pointed out, XP staggering is effectively a soft-cap on XP that noone complains about and as such achieves the objective without much fuss.

@Coin said:

Thirded.

As far as the original topic goes:

Staggering XP does work, to an extent. There are exceptions. For example, if you have a player like Spider, whose obsession with gaining every little mote of XP possible leads her to obsessively running as much stuff as possible--sure, you'll have someone who is consistently supplementing their diminishing returns. (This is as close to a compliment as I am ever going to give her.) But that's an exception. And even she has never been able to keep the constant PRP running for long enough for it to make a very big difference (or perhaps that was just the way TR did XP that prevented it) without burning out.

There's no one better way to do XP; but each way does promote different styles of play and character building. A hard cap, no matter how high, will make players consider their character sheet "end game" a lot more than otherwise, for example, while a system like The Reach's/Fallcoast's will allow people to spend whatever on whatever because there's always more XP down the pipe as long as other people are active and running stuff.

Different strokes.

The way that RfK choose to handle this was by staggering the XP spends rather then XP gains, the beats per XP were raised by 1 every 50 XP. So even though the older characters were at over 1000 beats, they were at that point paying double the cost of everything compared to someone new.

@HelloRaptor said:

Not too long ago I was asked if I had a copy of a news file I wrote for mage years ago, because they remembered it'd been funny but to the point they wanted to make. Took me about five minutes to find a search term, but I was able to pull it up and pass it along. Nothing to do with paranoia, it was just useful to have an archive of all the things ever.

This is actually the only use my own logs have been put for so far. It's especially useful when you or someone else accidentally destroy a characters sheet and you can find the previous version somewhere in your logs. I'm not going to say how many times this happened but it was more then one <.<

@HelloRaptor said:

For the record, for your facepalming pleasure @Groth, the primary incident I was referring to above where I later found out I'd been played was because I got logs from everyone concerned (where multiple players were accusing one other player) and ruled based on what appeared to be the accused's log being doctored. It turned out the others involved had all doctored theirs in the same way to make it look like he was up to some shady shit so he'd get banned. People are fucking assholes.

I have no words for that level of terrible.

@Coin said:

Not to mention that it's pretty trivial to doctor a log.

While it is trivial to doctor a log in most cases, my method of dealing with it so far has been to ask all parties involved if the log is accurate, so far noone has claimed a log is inaccurate. If a situation comes up where someone does claim the log is inaccurate, then you have a situation where Staff have to act one way or another since someone involved is making rather bold lies.

@Derp said:

If so, then act on it. If not, then do nothing, or take some other action that you feel is necessary if you think that the person providing the complaint is overreacting/full of it/missing information/etc.

What more can you really do and hope to get something concrete and irrefutable?

In many cases you'll have a situation where there's nothing concrete to act on presently but there is a legitimate concern that there might be something developing. The best way to approach that is to make a record of current events so that if it comes up again later, especially with a completely different person, you'll know it's a pattern rather then an one-off occurrence. There are a lot of behaviours which are not problematic when done once, but become toxic to the game if repeated.

@Arkandel said:

There's the flipside of it, when staff - usually wanting to wash their hands clean off having to pick a side in whatever's happening - ask for 'evidence' before they'll take action.

Evidence, of course, is next to impossible to gather.

Well, it depends a lot on what it's about. Players are often more then willing to send logs Staff's way but in most cases the log won't contain what the Player thinks it contains because often the complaint is not about what the other player actually did but rather some 'subtext' or 'hidden agenda'.

There are some MU* players who are a bit obsessive about logging which sometimes comes in handy, we had one case where we as Staff needed to sort out what happened in a scene 6 months prior and one of the players involved actually had the log available!

@Admiral said:

And years later I found out what it was, and it was something I had nothing to do with and was just some jealous girl trying to remove some other girl's RP partners through frivolous sexual harassment complaints.

...I think I just reminded myself why I don't play on MU*s as much as I used to.

It happens sometimes that people come up with amazing lies in an attempt to get other people ejected from a game. It works more often then it should just because it's so unexpected and Staff will usually only catch on by the time they try it for the second time on the same game.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Coin

@Ganymede

I don't like anonymous complaints. As an adjudicator, I want to know who the accuser is. But that does not mean I have any obligation to disclose this to the accused.

I believe this was covered above, but when talking about anonymous complaints we were referring in particular to the person filing them being anonymous to anyone and everyone. i.e. I can put in a complaint 'Ganymede is a pedophile and tried to show me her kiddy porn collection.' and even the staff reading it have no idea who put it in. Which also means that when multiple complaints about the same behavior comes in, staff has no way of seeing that it's the same person making the complaint, which can be problematic if it would otherwise be clear that it's someone just trying to stir up shit for someone else.

I don't care who the accuser is. However what I do care about is accusations having some sort of basis. An anonymous complaint without any verifiable information in it is just a rumour. These can be useful to Staff in that it can make them pay attention to something they wouldn't otherwise be aware of but by themselves they carry no weight as far as accusations go, regardless of how many times they're made.

@WTFE said:

Yeah, I really hate to agree with @HelloRaptor.

I'm tempted to just leave it at that, but… I actually do agree with him. Anonymous complaints are the single worst way to reduce drama in a body of human beings that has ever been conceived.

While we used them on RfK we didn't have any issues with them, however it wasn't an anonymous complaint box, it was an anonymous feedback survey and we didn't get all that many complaints coming in through that route. The main reason we set it up is because as Staff we are really reliant on getting feedback from players as we're often too busy running the game to be active participants so we'll grow out of touch with how people are behaving on the grid. However players are often very reluctant to say anything to us unless WW3 has broken out (Or someone has decided to not TS them anymore, basically the same thing right?).

We had a few cases of sexual harassment where it turned out after looking into it that the players in question had been acting inappropriately to almost every player on the entire game but none of them had individually considered it important enough to bring to our attention. It was after the third case of that happening that we started to experiment with anonymous surveys.

@WTFE said:

@Admiral said:

It's easier to be an asshole and apologize later than to not be an asshole.

You know what's even easier? Recognizing that every human being who has ever lived and ever will live has been and/or will be an asshole at some point or another. Your message here being a case in point. (And mine, for that matter.)

Yes. In my experience only a tiny minority of people enjoy being assholes. Most of the time poor behaviour is caused by misunderstandings or the person lashing out due to a bad day.

I don't have any experience with TR but I think that situations like what happened between you, Spider and Sunny is why it's a good idea to offer an anonymous way to provide feedback.

I don't know exactly what you meant by 'I got used to saying that we couldn't police Feels' but what we felt was always one of our top priorities on Kingsmouth was maintaining a good OOC atmosphere and almost half of our staff meeting time each week probably went to solving 'people problems' of various kinds.

In the end, most things brought to our attention would fall into one of the following categories.

1. Assumptions of bad faith, either due to rumors, previous history or a 'feeling'. Either way our reply would consistently be an urging to assume good faith and if it turns out that the other person was actually evil, we'll deal with it.
2. Relationship issues, usually two characters would start an IC relationship and one of the players would try to bring it OOC at which point the other player would want to escape into outer space. The solution here was usually to let the second player switch to another faction so they could avoid eachother, for the most part there were only minor grumblings about the deus ex machina involved.
3. Actual poor behaviour of some sort. In these cases we'd talk with the offending players about the problem and what we expected out of them. Those that continued behaving poorly would get indefinitely banned.

What I've really grown to despise is rumours because whenever I investigated them they'd turn out to be laughably inaccurate, resulting from a combination of Chinese whispers and someone with an axe to grind. They're toxic to game atmosphere and genuinely harmful since a non-zero amount of players will believe the rumour to be true and avoid a player for something they didn't do.

I agree. A random run generator can be a great starting point for someone that wants to PrP a run but it can never replace a run.

@Misadventure said:

Most of the fun on a game is partaking of a consensual belief that there is fun to be had and you are having it. The fun isn't an illusion, but you can certainly talk yourself out of it, even when it is perfectly fair and healthy fun. Attitude does a lot to how you perceive the world.

Yes, you'll never have fun on any game if you can't bring yourself to enjoy it on its own terms.

Let it go

When RfK started, it consisted of Shava playing a dozen NPC's, her husband and about 5 PCs. When RfK closed it had over 100 unique active players and no active NPCs. As the game grew it became much more political then it was while it was still very small and the relative importance of Shava's husband became much smaller.

I'm not sure why @Tempest feels like they have anything to contribute about RfK events that happened after March 2014. There were plenty enough real issues with RfK that you don't need to make them up with your imagination.

@Ganymede said:

I tried to do this on Fallcoast.

I am putting together a proposal for coders to set up a game that follows RfK's model.

The hardest part is that a game like this requires a very dedicated Head Staff with a strong vision of what they want to achieve, those can be hard to find.

@Sundown said:

See, I would've thought a mechanics, systems-heavy game would never be something I'd enjoy, but it was. I just let my friend handle the crunchy bits and I did the diplomatic schmoozing. Because on this game, the subtle intrigue play was actually finally possible.

Also, all I see when @Coin says "narrative game" is "make your own fun." Which is okay, but ultimately it's an empty game unless /someone/ runs plots in which most of the playerbase can be included. Even then, if the playerbase is fragmented, it'll end up sandboxy, with consequences not really propagating over the entire game world.

The fundamental limitation of MU* when compared to TT is that the Storyteller is a very limited resource. There will never be enough dedicated Staff to run scenes for a non-trivial playerbase at a regular basis and Player-Storytellers will always have a hard time to run anything with impact because they're players and the setting is managed by Staff by necessity, any other arrangement and the world would not be consistent.

Keeping that in mind the inevitable conclusion is that the vast majority of RP that is going to take place on a MU* is going to be social RP. Characters interacting with eachother with no direct NPC/Plot involvement. The question then becomes, how do we make social RP fun?

The approach attempted by RfK for that question was to give the characters something to RP about. The purpose of territories/influences etc were not to let players play online RISK when not RP'ng, it was to provide a constant source of recent events to bring to the on-screen RP.

For the most part it was very successful, characters would constantly RP about territory negotiations, alliances, political backstabbing etc even to the extent we'd sometimes get mock complaints of 'I don't have the time to TS because I'm too busy with politics!'.