Best posts made by Roz

I'm excited to see more games on Ares! I'm in a closed Alpha on one right now, and holy crap guys, everyone's gonna go nuts for the continual web/game integration.

@A-B Hey just out of curiosity, why can't you connect to the game itself?

@bear_necessities said in The Savage Skies:

I'm not really keen on the idea of polling the playerbase in general bc I don't feel like it really does anything except make people start thinking the game is on it's last legs? If I were you I would just head into the next adventure. As long as you & Blu are actively running plots that aren't blocked to people, people will play.

I'm not on this game, but I disagree in a general sense. When I see polls from staff about the game regarding what players don't like or what they want more of, it makes me feel like they're interested in opinions, not that the game's dying.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I definitely think staff need to enforce their own theme and rules. Hell I wish all the time that Arx would enforce their PB rules that are written in the very rule files, about not obviously race changing a character away from their desc.

Have you submitted requests about these? Because staff definitely doesn't go through and look at every character page in search of it. Sometimes you gotta point their attention to an issue. There's too many PCs for them to proactively enforce by checking all the pages every day.

I can tell you that there explicitly have been issues when they've enforced it, but they had to be made aware.

@reversed said in MU Things I Love:

@silverfox said in MU Things I Love:

Ironwool bathing suit

Was strongly considering ironwool Red Sonja

My new favorite Arx truth is "Red Sonja is Oathlands fashion."

@Caractus I certainly think the app speaks for itself.

Getting to circle back on story threads that began literal years ago. Continuity's so hot.

@ganymede said in A healthy game culture:

@faraday

I’m sorry, but whereas the majority of gamers may not be dicks I can tell you from almost 25 years of experience that Vampire, as a game, seems to tease out the worst of them.

I think this goes hand in hand with Faraday's point about a game's structure and environment bringing out different sides of people -- it can also ATTRACT certain kinds of players. If someone loves being an asshole about competitive environments, they'll seek out places where they can leverage that.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

"Brings out the worst in people" is an excuse. It is putting all the blame on the game, and not on the people. If that's not what you mean, don't say it like that.

"The game attracts assholes" is fine, and true. "The game enables assholish behaviour under the cover of simple IC action" is fine, and true. "The way the game is usually run lends itself to more overt PVP activity." Also fine, also true. "The game brings out the worst in people" is inaccurate at best and an excuse at worst.

Those are not the things I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about the thing that happens where one player can be super chill on one type of game and then super not chill on a different type of game. Yes, the person is still responsible for their behavior. Yes, if they can't play on the game constructively, then you get rid of them. It's not about saying it's the game's fault. It's still that person's fault. And it's not saying that everyone who plays on a competitive game will turn into an over-competitive asshole. It's saying that different types of games can see different patterns of issues, and it can be helpful to keep that in mind when talking about how to cultivate a healthy game culture.

@devrex said in GMs and Players:

I really don't understand why we're turning this whole thing of "setting down rules" and abiding by them into "you terrible abuse enablers."

FWIW I think it's worth pointing out that some of these reactions and responses are absolutely driven not just by this particular conversation, but a lot of previous conversations had with Derp centered on the same topic of balancing this particular issue. I wouldn't necessarily take responses to him as also necessarily being aimed at you.

@Arkandel said:

@Roz said:

Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.

Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.

I just mean that if your point is that you're not banning any IC actions of that nature, it's because you're not banning anything, not because there's no difference between the two and no reason to consider them differently. That's all I mean. I'm being obnoxiously derailing.

Please, nit-pick all you can! I'd like to poke holes into my pitch, that's the whole point of it.

Haha, nah, I'm not even really poking holes in your overall pitch, just the one sentence. Hence me saying I'm derailing. (I probably wouldn't want to play on the game myself, because I just have different ideas of what I want to see on a game.)

On a personal note I simply don't like rating horrible acts. Rape is a heinous thing to do to another human being, it's a crime, it's wrong. But so is murder. So is torture. I don't believe it's in the purview of running a game to determine 'which is worse' - they are all nasty. That doesn't mean other people couldn't decide for whatever reason one is worse than others and ban it from their setting, though.

It's not really about rating horrible acts. The reason rape plots get banned some places is because of the very different ways in which people are affected by it and our society treats it. That is, you're way more likely to have victims of sexual assault -- likely multiple ones -- playing on your game, and more likely than not they either 1) didn't report it because our society sucks at handling these cases, or 2) did report it but experienced first-hand how shitty our society is at handling these cases. It's not really a matter of rating the horrible acts, but rating how comparatively horrible our society is at handling one of them in particular and how widespread the affect of it is. I won't say rape is worse than murder. I will say that our treatment of rape victims is way worse, and our treatment of rape as a narrative in art is also worse.

@Ghost said:

But it's true, right? We log into these games because we are seeking to be entertained. For some people that means sharing the rp experience like an improv acting troupe; that what we are trying to recreate on some level is a bunch of drama-interested playwrights writing stories together. For others it's I want to be entertained and if I'm not having fun, even if having fun means everything goes my way, then I walk.

I'd argue that people who come onto games without any sense of cooperative entertainment aren't really looking to roleplay; they're looking for other people to help them write a book.

Roleplaying is a team sport, not a solo one.

You know what going online is? It's sitting at your desk in real life and typing with your real life hands and having social interactions with other people. These interactions are not magically fake. You are as accountable for how you treat others in a digital space as how you treat them in a physical space. We live in a digital world, and the rules of asshole behavior don't magically change. All of the good and bad of "real life" happen online: people are harassed and abused, people make lifelong friendships, people meet their soulmates and get married.

If you want to say that your character's life is not real life, sure. That's totally true. But that's clearly not what you're saying.

I've fudged, but always to the benefit of the players and the story, and always with publicly alerting the people in the scene. Most of the time that means giving characters pay-off for cool or epic choices when they have bad luck with a roll. Sometimes that actually means modding a baddie NPC up a little to provide a better fight -- with the interest of giving the characters a more epic battle. Of course, these were all PvE type environments; if it came to a PvP situation, I feel like you have to be a lot more strict, because then there's players on both sides of the equation.

But also note that I've either GMed without stats or a system or with FS3, so I don't have any WoD experience.

So I haven't read a lot of this thread, but I can talk about something we've discovered on Lost & Found that's been pretty successful for us: Tumblr. We're in a position where our game canon -- not just Transformers, but specifically the comic More Than Meets the Eye -- has a huge fanbase on Tumblr. We've had a game Tumblr since inception. At one point we got a player who was experienced with MU*s but also active on Tumblr and the TF fandom there, and they started poking around RPer accounts on there and inviting people who seemed promising. I mean, Tumblr already seems like an awful platform to RP on, because it kind of makes conversation really difficult, and I've always believed that these people would probably be open to other options if presented to them. So now we've had a whole bunch of players who came in from Tumblr and learned the mechanics of the game, and we suddenly started exploding in size.

Here's the catches:

1. You have to be exceptionally newbie-friendly. We've been rolling out super basic guides to a lot of stuff both on the wiki and on the game. A lot of these folks have never heard of MUs, but could become awesome MU players as long as you're open to hand-holding for a while. Honestly, we've gotten some players for Tumblr who have picked up things faster than veteran MU*ers who can't for the life of them remember certain commands they use regularly.

2. We had to bring on more staff, and if we didn't have players willing, we would be in a position where we couldn't handle things at all. We went from a three-person staff to something like eight (although those additional folks mostly in specialized positions). If we didn't have people who were willing and able to step up and run plot and process apps, it wouldn't have been successful.

So I guess the moral of the story is: recruit outside the usual places. Find your audience if you're not getting enough from the MU* population.

@GirlCalledBlu I tend to think PC-centric plots are always better served by a different GM running things, whether or not the PC is a staff PC.

But also, there are two different answers here: is Yolo generally known by the playerbase as being a very giving and player-centric staffer? Does he have a reputation for making lots of story for other people? Then most folks probably won't be bothered by him getting his own story. And if they are, there's a certain defense in going, "Listen, I've run a lot of story for the game and for other players, I think it's fair for me to have one plot focused on my character right now."

Does he have a history of issues balancing spotlight as far as the rest of the playerbase is concerned? Then it's not going to look great.

@seraphim73 said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I also think it may be time to officially made the Ad thread ads only. No discussion whatsoever. Want to discuss a game? Put up a Hog Pit thread (for the down'n'dirty) or a Constructive thread (for the random chatter). Keep the ad thread for details (the ad, any updates such as big events, opening of new spheres or OCs etc) only.
How's that sound?

Eh. I kind of like having general-overview sort of comments about the game from others. I also think that it's valuable to have Staff answer some questions about the game there in the ad thread (system, CvC or CvE focus, Can I Have A Gold, etc). I agree that it's really easy for them to get derailed, and it may be more effort moderating them than it's worth, but I think it's definitely worth something.

I think that we all like having some general overview comments from others, along with the opportunity to ask questions, but @Auspice is totally right that they tend to become shit shows more often than not. So I totally get the consideration of just putting discussion and questions somewhere else entirely. Like, yeah, it kind of sucks, but so does our general inability to behave in ad threads, so what're you gonna do?

Untitled Goose Game is a HONKIN' good time.

HONK HONK MOTHERFUCKERS