@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
Things I really don't care about: leaked game plots.
I'm not sure I can name a game where my enjoyment of the game hinged on wanting to know how the plot played out (Although the ending of ME3 almost ruined the game for me). The enjoyment comes from the storytelling and gameplay.
If they still played football like this, I'd actually watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obneC8zQNIQ
@TNP said in General Video Game Thread:
@Auspice Makes sense. Though I type almost all day at work and then type more at home and that doesn't bother me. Heavy mouse usage can but I'm leery about the amount of thumb movement required with a controller. That's isolating a very specific muscle and nerve. I suppose only trying it will prove anything.
I think that if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, it's important to find a controller that fits your hand well because it greatly affects the tension and strain you'll feel in your fingers.
I've watched 3 episodes of Motherland: Fort Salem and I still don't quite know what to make of it. Thoughts, anyone?
The worldbuilding is pretty cool, but the premise in and of itself is a bit whackadoodle. I think it might be too much for the casual tv watcher to handle.
I haven't actually watched it yet, but isn't the premise basically just 'What if elite soldiers were magic?'. Depending on how they choose to play it, it could easily fit in next to the likes of Top Gun, 24 or Homeland with magic instead of fighter jets.My biggest concern before watching it would be how much it plays into fascism and imperialism and I'm hoping it will be a good undermining of those elements rather then embracing it like many other military themed shows.
Edit:
After having watched 3 episodes I feel like they've taken an interesting premise and then just.... not really done anything with it. It's mostly just a bunch of random relationship drama that I have a hard time paying any attention to because at no point have they made me care about the characters yet. 3 episodes in I can't really tell you what drives any of the characters aside from their urge to fuck eachother in semi-public spaces.
@Tinuviel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
We keep using that phrase as if we haven't seen metric fuck-loads of unreasonable behaviour from seemingly sensible people this entire time.
That is true. It's very very difficult to be reasonable during extraordinary circumstances. I think that as people get more time to digest the circumstances a new standard for what is considered normal will develop and there will be less erratic behavior.
@GreenFlashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Expecting apartment staff to be able to keep up the standards of cleanliness required right now to avoid the spread of the disease is not a reasonable expectation.
It's not reasonable, but I'm seeing it everywhere. My gym requires trainers to sanitize every surface one of us touches when we're done touching it, not users, because they can't accept responsibility for users cleaning equipment. GameStop is pretending it's providing sanitizers to its employees to keep their stores clean (side note, do not visit GameStop, as anonymous employees report these claims of sanitized stores are lies). It's a mess.
Noone actually expects a store to be sanitized do they? The reasonable expectation is that everything you touch in a public space is contaminated and you should wash your hands when you get home and avoid touching your face.
Here's my main peeve right now. The pandemic means we'll get no Eurovision this year, it's one of my favorite family traditions 
@GreenFlashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@GreenFlashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I suspect it's less about your safety than their fear of legal liability.
What liability?
If you get sick on their premises, there's at least an argument to be made that your illness is their responsibility for not disinfecting the facility; and if they get sued, I can't imagine their business owner insurance covers pandemics.
People can sue over whatever you want, but I doubt you'll get any court to believe that an apartment complex owner is negligent for not managing to keep a laundry room disinfected during a pandemic.Usually you just have to show you're following best practices and best practices are going to be to ensure that there's posted rules about hygiene habits. For instance it's probably a very good idea to wash your hands before and after you do laundry in a public space.
@wahoo said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
So unrelated.
My most horrible neighbors who live with SIX PEOPLE in a /two bedroom/ (but drive BMWs and buy their TODDLERS fucking Docle & Gabbana shirts and smoke in common areas and are just generally THE WORST) have, according to them, a burst pipe and please guess how very little I think the HoA should pay for their repairs.
Doesn't that depend on the terms of the HoA and the specific place the pipe burst? In the HoA I used to live in that maintained their own water well and sewage treatment, the HoA was responsible for the pipe up to the main valve(It was designed so house owners could close it with a utility key for winter to prevent the pipes freezing) for each individual property while the house owner was responsible for everything past that point.
@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Jeshin said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Privatizing profits - When the economy is good only those invested benefit.
Private ownership of the means of production is the hallmark of any capitalist nation. This is true even in socialist nations, where people are allowed to own real and personal property. I do not understand why it is morally wrong to retain the profits one earns through one's labor and/or property.
Socializing losses - When the economy is bad suddenly the Government (via taxpayers) should come help a company that was all about profit for their shareholders and nothing else before. Suddenly it's in the national interest.
The fundamental principle of socialism is to enact policy to benefit the most people rather than favor a smaller group. Said another way, government should act in a way that benefits the greater good. Where there is catastrophe, a socialist nation should move to allocate government resources to where the most can benefit, and this is morally good, in my opinion. But this is also, as you put it, "socializing losses." Another way to put it is "insuring against common risk." I therefore do not see how "socializing losses" is morally wrong.
Socializing losses is a direct transfer of wealth from the tax payers to those who own assets. In essence you're telling asset owners that they should feel free to pursue maximum risk strategies with no concerns whatsoever because if anything ever goes wrong, that will be paid by the tax payers.
Now if you genuinely think that the purpose of a good government is to funnel money from those who pay taxes into the pockets of those who own assets, I'm sure you can view that as a good thing. However I happen to think that a good government should be trying to make the people as a whole prosperous rather then a wealthy minority pursuing high risk strategies.
If we're looking at the US specifically. A lot of companies used the low interest rate as an opportunity to take very large loans which they then used to buyback stocks to the benefit of senior executives who get paid in stocks. Now that there is a crisis, those companies have a huge debt and no revenue. Without intervention those companies are looking at a stock value of 0 dollars and a complete asset liquidation.
What possible benefit is it to society at large to bail out the creditors who gave out those loans and executives and investors who benefited from those buybacks? That's a straight up transfer of wealth to people who engaged in reckless behavior for short-term profit.
The correct thing to do in my opinion isn't to bail out the investors and the creditors, it's for the Government to force the investors and the creditors to take the loss, because they deserve that loss and take over the company so it can hopefully be resold to someone more responsible.
@Seamus
So the thing about the seasonal flu is that even though it has a tendency to infect a very high percentage of the population in a relatively short amount of time (It tends to spike very very hard in January) it's not known for causing the hospitals to enact emergency measures and start using all their elective surgery rooms as extra intensive care halls. Only a relatively tiny percentage of the Italian population is estimated to have been infected and they are at 200% of their normal hospital capacity. With that in mind what do you think their hospitals would look like if they didn't lock down the country to prevent further spread?
Further aside from deaths directly attributable to the virus itself, what do you think happens to you if you've been in a car accident or have a heart attack while the hospitals get stretched past 200% normal capacity?
The reason that the total number of deaths so far is relatively low when compared to the seasonal flu is because of the extraordinary length that most countries have gone to try to limit the spread.
@Seraphim73 said in Testing the Waters for Battletech Interest:
I'd be down for Battletech, certainly. If you weren't set on using the tabletop rules for Mech combat, you could certainly do it well enough in FS3.3 (although Heat would have to be handled via Ammo or GM fiat).
Ironically maybe, I think a super crunchy tabletop game like Battletech is actually way easier to code into Ares then any given RPG system. Reason being that it has pretty clear cut rules you just have to translated into code rather then the layers upon layers of exceptions that make up most RPG rules.
The biggest question would be if you would want mech combat on an actual grid or abstract it to be more text friendly.
@juke
There are some people out there who are very deliberately manipulative like Athanasius/Sovereign/etc or the legendary VASpider who have made an artform out of isolating people and preying on the vulnerable. Athanasius in particular made it his MO to catch female characters in chargen because that gave him the opportunity to try to manipulate them before they knew anything or anyone else in the game.
Others out there like Thrace/Issac/etc are just kind of... dumb? Thrissac has no master plan. He just keeps harassing/stalking female players because he seems to think that if he's just persistent enough they'll give in?
That said from a game management perspective it ultimately doesn't matter if it's deliberate manipulation or lashing out. If someone makes the other players uncomfortable and can't fix their behavior they should be shown the door.
@Roz said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
I tend to find it less than helpful to spin predatory behavior as something that's somehow just reflexive or the product of mental illness. His mental state is between him and whatever mental health professionals he might engage.
His behavior is purposefully predatory, full stop.
It's mainly that when it comes to men behaving like asshats it's common to over-estimate how much thought they actually put into their behavior. When it comes to being -helpful- I sometimes wonder how worthwhile it would be to establish a shared banlist between games for the particularly malicious actors out there. While some people might get banned because they're a bad fit for a specific game, others like this particular person seems like he's a bad for for -any- game and some pain could be saved by having them ejected preemptively.
@Kestrel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
I also don't buy the innocent "blinks slowly" reaction he gave when I said his behaviour had made me uncomfortable. Looking at this thread, I know I'm not the first person to have ever said something like this to him. It's simply impossible to believe that after however many incidents of him behaving this way and having it pointed out to him, he remains oblivious.
I'm on psychologist or anything but from my experience that kind of behavior isn't so much deliberate psychological manipulation as much as it's a kind of delusion where they're unable to take any kind of criticism and a seemingly compulsive need to make everything about themselves. Trying to guilt people seems more of a reflex then something they think about as a coherent tactic.
Where his entire approach gets extremely nutty is in the very premise of the strategy he is trying to use.
First off, if you don't get along with the staff you shouldn't play the game. There's enough games out there there's no reason to play a game where you don't trust the people running it.
Second off, you're never going to get anyone on your side by actively trying to sabotage them. That's not an appeal strategy, it's inanity.
@nyctophiliac
I'm sorry
@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
I will say that, when considering making a new character, I would much rather play something at the barony level rather than anything fancier. Sadly, the baronies tend to be pretty much devoid of players.
The problem is that if you eliminate baronies and the like, you avoid player dispersion, but at the cost of wiping out an entire sort of character background. Then again, no one actually stays poor, but for a few glorious weeks you could RP being concerned about pig herders and your one good horse looking a little under the weather.
That doesn't need to be the cost at all. Even if baronies no longer exist as organisations, you're still perfectly capable of playing a poor member of a noble family and you could still be appointed the Baron of three pig herders and a horse if you want to without that needing to be an org.
@Roz said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
Why would they not have been a good idea? If they weren't allowed, we'd just see all the growth happening at the March level and above where there's a lot less room to go. The thing people are interested in is the process and story of growth and building something, not necessarily "Being a March instead of a County."
The downside to having more organisations down the ladder is that it leads to more orgs in general which leads to less players per org which leads to having a harder time engaging in any org based RP. Now that's not always awful for the title holder since they have the avenue of fealty based RP but in my experience it can be pretty awful for anyone else in those orgs which helps explain why many of the remaining Baronies and Counties are almost completely dead orgs.
So it seems that in the end with the Elevation being postponed until after actions were running again, everything proceeded without all that much gnashing of teeth. I still think there's some open questions about what Arx fealty diagrams are supposed to look like long term however.
I'm not keeping very close track but it definitely feels like we're drifting towards PC houses only being Marches and above. It might be worthwhile to ask if PC Baronies and Counties were ever a good idea.
Just after RFK closed we brainstormed a few ideas of what a fun MU* could be and one of the ideas we had was a superhero academy where the Staff and people volunteering to PRP would play the teachers and the grid would represent an artificial city filled with training scenarios and every now and then they'd be attacked by actual villains.
The way I'd set up a superhero game these days would just be to use Ares since it gives you practically everything that you need out of the box.
@TNP said in ISO: a comics/superheroes MU* (give me your recs):
And yes, we still enforce rules and take action when someone ignores three warnings. I suspect that's common to most places.
Fuck no, that's the dumbest approach ever.
There's two kinds of problematic players, those who do learn and those who don't. If you talk to someone about a problematic behaviors of theirs and they repeat it, they're not going to improve the 2nd or 3rd time either.