Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@JinShei I am sixty-six shades of curious and I'll happily read any log, however trivial, but while I whine, I don't snoop.

@Caggles said in What do player-STs need?:

How DARE you run things that people might enjoy. Back in your box!

Sowwy, boss.

@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@silverfox

I mean, as long as you're not saying it in the earshot of kids who are immuno-compromised, I don't really see an issue? I mean, unless you're saying it in front of the high-risk kids (or the kids whose parents have cancer, or -- so on), but I don't think that's something you'd do.

Seconded. Putting children's minds at ease and helping them not live in existential terror. This is not at all the same as people happily arguing on Twitter that there is no reason to worry, only the weak will die. It's not in the same street, it's not even in the same city.

Keep on being the voice of reason in your kidlets' lives. They need somebody to be.

@Tinuviel The sad thing is, I honestly wouldn't even know. That's how unimaginative I am in such matters. Which doesn't bode very well for my eventual writing of steamy scenes either, I suspect.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

Ares has an extensive set of tutorials starting from 'hello world' and building up to adding a new field to the web portal. And of course you can always ask on the forums or discord. or page me on the test game or PM me here or send a carrier pigeon... I mean really, there's a lot of avenues for helping people to figure things out.

Credit where credit is due. I have coded for MERC/DIKU and I've done some php but I am by no means a coder -- and I have been able to write a simple plugin or two for Ares based on those tutorials.

@Wretched Except your third grade teacher probably doesn't get paid by the state to live a millionaire lifestyle. And probably deserves it more.

@JinShei We need to either abandon this idea or make it so absolutely horrible that we can hold it up as a poster to future generations on why you should never ever abuse admin privileges to spy on players.

@insomniac7809 That has got to be one of the most meme-ified comic strips ever.

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:
From extreme examples of doxxing, stalking and spamming to the more everyday cases of drama, hurt feelings, and in-game cheating. These things have happened with reasonable frequency. That's why so many folks are touchy about it, even beyond the philosophical "privacy is a right" arguments.

One of the things that made me give up on World of Warcraft a few years back was the profound attitude among regular players that EVERY roleplayer must be there only for virtual porn. And that it is totally all right to follow them around, screenshot everything they do, and use any means available to sneak into their guilds, chats, and conversations, to prove that they are perverts who should be banned from the game. It got very, very tedious.

Bad TV? "Alta Mar" on Netflix. It's so horrible I'm in love. Why did I live 49 years before anyone introduced me to Spanish soap operas?

@Pandora Quite, but it does pertain to the perception of privacy in games, and to what mood you set as game admins.

Blizzard enacted a zero-tolerance policy to a point where someone claiming you did the nasty could be enough to get you banned for a while, evidence be damned. Other games I've played have been, anything goes, and in some cases, admins will be snooping, or even using admin commands to make their virtual girlfriends go down on them while the player is AFK.

It's not a code issue. It's a people issue. And in that, it's an admin issue. The policy you set as admin, the way you act and carry yourself, carries over to the player base. Players mimic the attitude of the admin team.

@Goblin 2 people here. -TWO-

@Tinuviel One game I played on handled it fairly well by letting players know that their complaints had been read and addressed, and in case of larger infractions, a publically available note in the style of, "We have received reports about this and that behaviour, please be adviced that this is against rules, and that some players have been disciplined." No names, no details, but as a complainer, you knew that your complaint hadn't just ended up in somebody's spam filter.

@JinShei 41 degrees Celsius here yesterday. That's 107 degrees Fahrenheit. In freaking Denmark.

@Derp I'm a little pressed there, because I have in fact never read the Dresden Files and don't know the character.

I am leaning towards Mac the generic Barkeep of, uh, the Hamburg Files instead, can be both. He may be an NPC who only really interacts for plot reasons. He could also be a staff PC who regularly strikes up chats with players for no particular reason, has an encouraging word for everyone, and cheap beer on Wednesdays.

What he's not, though, is a PC who suddenly decides to sell his bar, become a travelling salesman, and marry Agnes the player character.

Had to put our dog to sleep this morning. 11 1/2 years. Going to miss the shit out of the old man, but he was done. He just wanted to sleep.

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

@L-B-Heuschkel

In this case, I used Mac for a specific reason:

Mac has a relationship with Harry Dresden, and will sometimes help him out if he has some information, but has to be careful about how he does so because he has Accorded Neutral Territory...

BUT he also has his own agenda, and often politics in the background, showing up with new information and actions that he's taken, which on a MU often translates to 'has to interact with PCs to get that done'. He's a mover in the world.

I'd place this one in staff PC territory -- YMMV. It's the kind of character who can be a recurring guest on the show, so to speak, and who definitely has his own agenda and motives. But as he is still, technically, an NPC, moving the plot on will always take precedence -- even if it means that you, as his staff player, sometimes need to come up with reasons why he's still there, instead of having gone out and done the thing, whatever the thing is. He's still a literary device -- just a very well fleshed out one.

@SixRegrets @menwritewomen on Twitter. The account you do not want to follow if you want to retain any faith in male authors and their ability to write, well, women.

@Derp said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?: I think it also depends on the type of game, too. What if the PC wants to, say, seduce one of the King's advisors to get information? Should we disallow that because it's an NPC? Would it not depend on the game, and the themes therein?

It's certainly tricky. I think that if I was staff, faced with this dilemma, I'd sit the player down and have a serious talk with them about what it is they want to achieve for their character. And then... well, to be frank, make it clear to them that I am not interested in playing that out in character, but I recognise the plot value of what they're doing. If they're okay with essentially a summary of what went down, maybe with a couple of rolls, go for it.

Should tell me pretty quick whether the player is interested in the story being driven forwards (even if it's not quite as exciting a way as actually acting it out), or they just want me to write porn for them.

@tangent I mean, this is obviously not good. Scraping the bottom of the barrel never is. But if it makes a few people higher up the food chain realise that perhaps paying teachers decent wages and giving them decent work conditions, it's not bad either. The process to get there, though.