Posts made by Lisse24

@Sparks

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

But they're not! I mean, the whole problem was that many of us (me included, as noted) treated them as if they were just a means of tracking who knew what. Which is why they spread so far so fast, and left poor Apos spending a non-trivial amount of time every week writing like 30 new ones.

This is a result of what I view as the major falling down of Arx. Don't get me wrong, this is the best thought out game I've played on since RfK and it generally provides what I look for in a game. However, the help files read like they've been written by someone with a technical background and they don't actually tell the players how to use the systems or commands or what these systems and commands are for.

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I was surprised at the spread of info too. I was treating each clue as a precious secret and only sharing with like one or two people at most and only if I felt they needed to know. Then I realized people were basically holding classes where info was committed at participants. I think a little more traitor element would help here, like in cooperative board games with potential traitor mechanics. Maybe have some agents of Fable amongst the PCs. Give them a clue and suddenly you forget all about it or maybe you start getting hunted down.

Due to an insane RL that started right after I decided to take a PC on the game, I never had many @clues shared with me. I sympathize with the player earlier, who is out doing tasks and stuff and feeling bored, because I was there. You can only do so much if people won't talk to you, and you can't force people to talk to you about plot. Well, you can, but you won't get very far doing it, and without having some base knowledge, you don't even know what you should be bringing up in RP.

However, I digress. My point is, that right now, my character's lack of clues is leading to interesting RP. Everyone in her family is under Fable's gaze and she's the only one who isn't AND SURPRISE, she's now a duchess and needs to make decisions. So there's all this tension around needing to know and knowing too much, which is fun. Also, generally being clueless, is also fun.

@Apos I feel like that's an indication that there's a lot of people chasing after the same things, but I suppose I would need to correlate by looking at which clues are known by a certain percentage of the population.

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

• My main concern is the suggestion someone made that at times support is given for OOC reasons. While staff has made it clear it's not cool to apply OOC pressure ("hey, did you back me up for my zoo project yet??") there's no real way to regulate trading favors OOC without RP and without running the game as a police state - which I agree it shouldn't be. And although I've watched people get bitched at on channels by staff about trying to get favors for their alts, once again it's pretty hard to track down alt-circlejerking trading.

Yeah, I mean its a sucky situation but it will always happen. I think the OOC gag order might actually be part of the problem. I dunno. Tasks/Support feels like such a black box to me. It's something that I really, really, really want to like but in the end it just confuses me. I do wish that I knew when I got support before the task closed at the end of the week. Also, I just found out that notes and rumors are no longer required and that made me so happy!

• Getting settled into the metaplot is a bitch and a half. It's probably the worst thing about the game, at least for me, because so much has happened and it takes a lot of reading to catch up. Arx can probably really benefit from a very basic 101 page somewhere, giving the fundamental facts and nothing else but links to where you can learn more.

I think the +crisis system will help with that a lot.

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I am very torn about resource management too. I just-- want to be rich and afford all of the nice things?? And it feels impossible to ever save up to the point of some of the stuff, especially for some of the less necessary but nice things. Like, I can afford to pay Sylvie 5,000 a week without bankrupting the house and also paying others, and at that point, it's 200 weeks before I could ever afford a steelsilk anything.

Which I get is a point, but at another it's just-- annoying. That's 4 years OOCly. Especially when other people already have all that stuff from being around early in Alpha.

Yeah, I just had a discussion with this with my house, because I feel like people should be able to afford some things, but we also shouldn't be bankrupting the house. I offered to up everyone's payments, but the feeling was that even with the upped payments no one would be able to afford anything, so we kept the payments low and ended up paying for really expensive armor out of the house account - which might be a mistake, or might be brilliant considering the current situation.

@Packrat Yeah, I hopped on here, because I tabbed over to the game to type a command and got a page full of code.

Also - I've been meaning to trap Cristoph for a scene!

It was inevitable. Someone had to stop the impending crusade!

@Ganymede I'm so sorry that you and your family have to go through this! You all will be in my thoughts and prayers and if there is anything at all that I can do, please, please, please let me know!

@Arkandel I would be down with something like that as well.

@Thenomain said in +wantrp Command Suggestion:

Yet here we are, on a board, having a civil conversation about tools. I can still use email for useful conversation even though it's mostly filled with cruft. I couldn't possibly use a Mu* bboard nowadays, I wouldn't ever go back to my old email client. The tools have changed, the applications evolved, but they are fundamentally the same.

And yet, bboard doesn't fulfill the basic function of serving as a reminder to a particular player that I'm waiting on them for a scene and what I want that scene to be about. I mean, you can create a LRP/Want RP board, and some people might post to it, and the posts will be ignored and then usage will drop off because boards are a terrible way to organize RP.

The path I've been down before is working to create an awesome new system that would help resolve a common complaint...and it's never used. The culture has to want to use it. This very much starts with one person saying, "Hey, can I have this?" And for all my navel-gazing, that's enough to code it.

Here's the thing - I think something like this is wanted, even if people don't know it yet. Not only do I want a discrete, non-invasive way to remind people that I want RP, but what prompted this post was a discussion with a player. In this discussion, the player lamented that she was shy, and had no problem paging people once or twice, but felt self-aware doing it more than that. She admitted that she probably wasn't being aggressive enough in seeking RP, while simultaneously bemoaning that she hadn't really made "friends," despite being (from what I saw) a pretty decent RPer. I enjoyed my RP with her, and saw immediately that the chars could have connection and we agreed that we should RP again, and then that desire disappeared into the either. Maybe we will RP, but my life is busy and maybe I'll get distracted with people closer to me and she will be too shy to page and when her character drifts away, I will silently bemoan that we didn't RP more.

To get more specific: We've created an environment in MUs where it's hard (not impossible) for people to break out of RP cliques and for new people to break in. We expect people to act in a way that is not in line with human nature and then bemoan the results. I think this command will be used because it will appeal to the people who are not on this board - the people who want RP, but who come onto games and struggle to get it, and don't know the crowd well enough to page or who feel self-conscious about it.

I've been binging Dirk Gently, now that the season is over. It's good, not-serious, don't-think-too-hard fun that's very much in the vein of less-serious BBC sci-fi shows. I highly recommend it.

It also occurs to me that the show provides some inspiration for ghoul/vamp relationships. Most notably Bart & Ken which reminds me of a duo I played once.

@Thenomain I think those are good points, and I'm not generally someone to suggest commands for commands sake, but someone sends me an @mail and within a few days its lost in a sucking void of job spam.

As @skew says, I think there might be something to be said for having a separate system to manage and track personal requests. Especially as the MUing community ages and their ability to wait around all day for someone to happen to be available wanes.

So, people will doubtless argue with me on this, but I don't think the "Looking for RP" command/channel is effective when it comes to people actually finding RP. Yes, it switches a tag on, but most often the tag gets ignored. I think this is because so and so doesn't know you from Adam.

In the mean time, there is no good way for me to let a person know that I would like to RP with them other than paging them. If they're a busy person, it may take a while before we can connect, and because I'm proactive, I page them, and then I page them again the next day, and the next day and the next day. It gets annoying. Having been on both ends of this, it is annoying to be both the person paging and the person being paged.

Most recently, I've been on the receiving end. I've been busy and coming onto a game and getting pages every day, or every other day from people who I know want to RP with me and who are waiting so patiently makes me feel awful. And when I feel awful, I tend to try and avoid the person and situation making me feel awful, making me even less likely to RP with them.

There has to be a better way. So, what would people think about a command that worked like this?

PlayerA types: +wantRP PlayerB=Need update on plot.

Player B then gets a notification that PlayerA requested RP. Plus, PlayerB can also type something like +wantrp on its own and get a quick list of people waiting on scenes, and people that they've requested scenes from.

After PlayerA and PlayerB RP, PlayerB could type something like +wantrp/clear PlayerA to remove them from their list.

It's only a rough idea, and I have no authority to implement this anywhere, but thoughts?

For me, I would look at four areas in order to make this decision:

1. Is it widely adopted and/or generally expected on a game? (jobs/scheduling events)
2. Is it non-specific and/or general? (dream RP)
3. Do I intend to modify the concept/system to fit my own intentions? (combat systems, etc.)
4. Has the original creator put it up for public use? (lots of code)

If you can answer yes to at least one of those questions, I'd say go for it. Notice that #3 is talking about concepts and not code. In general, I think that even if you're gonna modify the code, if it's not freely or widely available, you should probably talk to the original creator and give them a heads up.

This is just personal, but ... I prefer plots smaller and immediate in focus and scope. That is because, in my experience, if you go for something big and grand, the IC power holders tend to snatch it up and start dominating it. Maybe, they might give some task to a lower status PC but they'll favor IC friends and allies, making it hard for new players to break into plot. Where, if you start a plot around a small group of non-powerful PCs, then you can make sure that you're cycling through the different orgs and PCs with plot.

I think the spreadsheet for coordinating plots and making sure that there are different things happening on grid is a great idea.

Oh, the trump tweet this morning has me all political. And I'm supremely annoyed at the lengths some of my more partisan friends are turning to defend him.
1 - Clinton did not threaten to remove the citizenship of anyone who burned the flag.
2 - You know she didn't cause the people saying she did are full of BS.
3 - Even if she did, it doesn't matter, because she /wasn't the president elect/.

So apparently, today is the day that I decided to fix all the logical flaws on FB.

@Arkandel said in The Apology Thread:

But although that kind of friendship is important I will return what I'm given, too. If I suggest playing together a few times and you decline but don't reciprocate later on I'll take the hint and not ask again. No harm done or insult taken but I'll share my time online with people who like spending theirs hanging out with me. I think that's fair.

This should be embossed in gold and hung over the door. It's my basic philosophy. I'm an easy-going person. I'll spend time with anyone ... as long as I think they want to spend time with me, too. In game, that means if I'm constantly bugging you for a scene, and you never seem to be up for it? Well, eventually you're going to be on my list of people to not-bug. If I page and chat and you're all standoffy? I won't page anymore.

@Miss-Demeanor said in RL Anger:

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

@Miss-Demeanor http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/22721/how-to-play-your-favorite-retro-video-games-on-your-windows-pc/

I've yet to get an emulator to function properly, and in looking at that link, nearly HALF the games on there (and all but one of the games I would want to play) don't even work for the emulators. Also, doesn't fix the problem for people that want a retro system for their kids to play on.

Right, which was the idea for my nephews. The games available on the Xbox are either way too babyish for them or a bit too hard. Old NES games would be just the right challenge level though. They don't take a lot of thinking, just hand-eye coordination.

@Jaded said in RL Anger:

Nintendo NES Classic Edition, a MSRP for $60.00 and fucking re-sellers have blown the market so out of proportion on this thing now you can't find it for less than $300.00 and the places that would sell it for $60.00 are continually sold out. Sonovabitch.

Yeah - I suggested my sister buy this for the nephews as a cheaper than an Xbox option. I feel guilty now.

@Tinuviel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

There has have been rumours laid down by unnamed sources that many Firan ex-pats have found themselves on Arx and have crafted niches and cliques. It's just a hypothesis, but it explains a great deal.

I said this.
In a conversation about having difficulty breaking into RP. I did not mean for it to be nearly as conspiratorial sounding as it's coming off here.
However, as I said in my previous post, people tend to favor playing with others that they know and like over strangers. Unless there's a concerted effort to force people out of these groups, you'll see cliques inevitably form.
There's a lot of people on Arx who used to play on Firan. I think it's inevitable that those people would form their own groups and favor playing with each other.

To be fair to Arx, this is a problem in any game that is either politically driven or deals with a central plot. Players will naturally circle up into self-made cliques and share plot details with other players that they like. I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing for players to play with people they like. The only time it becomes a real problem is when it becomes difficult for other players to break into the cliques and find RP and/or interact with plot in a meaningful way, which is why any game inspiring to be what Arx is needs to think long and hard about how to pull people out of their cliques and about how plot gets distributed.

I don't think Arx has this solved, but I would be surprised if it did. I do think they're making positive moves. The task system is still being worked on, but it encourages people to move out of their spheres. I think it could be modified to do this more than it does at the moment, but I know redesign is already being thought about. Also implemented is the @randomscene command which incentivizes each player seeking out 3 random people to RP with in the space of a week.

I think Arx staff would add that anyone can put in an investigation. While this is technically true and something one often hears about during these discussions, a player needs to be involved enough that they know what meaningful type of investigation to run and they need to have a RP circle to share the results with before that is a true way to encourage diverse RP and plot involvement, in my opinion.

TLDR; You're right, it's an issue, but every game of this type would have this issue and Arx is actively working on resolutions.