@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
That said if someone makes a factually incorrect statement at me, I'm going to correct them with math and it will be in spoiler tags from now on so those who think working things out is the devil don't need to snark all over the thread.
Dude, come on.
I just want to say that I have RPed SO MUCH about Berenice's fashion and most recently her Assembly outfit that bumped her way up to #2 on +score.
But also I find the idea of further lowering the ceiling on modeling and increasing the floor for things like event hosting, work/invest, and +donate to be super fair for balancing. Especially event hosting!
BUT YOU CAN TOTALLY RP ABOUT MODELING. I'm playing a dedicated fashionista socialite tho which probably makes a difference.
As for the matter of optimizing -- I think that there's a different between optimizing and specializing. Specializing is when you say "my character is focused in one specific area and all or most of their stats and skills will be in that area." Optimizing, to me, is more "what is the most efficient way to maximize the numbers as the system currently exists." Staff has generally indicated that their philosophy is that they want people to specialize or not based on what's IC for the character to pursue so that they can balance the system to optimize around that. As @Sparks said, they want the system to reward specialization in a way that you do get an advantage for it versus someone more generalized/spread out, or else you end up with a game full of generalists where anyone can basically do anything and no one is really shining in different ways.
Optimizing to just boil down everything to maximum efficiency for skill buys also runs the risk of literally becoming obsolete when the system is retooled/rebalanced.
I know that there are players for which optimizing the numbers is a source of a lot of fun! I think the issue that comes up is when the extremes kind of butt against each other. Like, a lot would be solved I think if people kind of just paused a beat to clarify if a level of detail on either end is what someone is asking for. If someone is just discussing their PC's overall skillset, comments about it not being "optimized" (like what @Goblin described happening to him) can be really premature and end up feeling unwelcoming and discouraging. Likewise, if you're asking for help and people start with the basics but what you're really looking for is more detailed stuff, just ask for more detail instead of assuming people won't help or are hiding info.
@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
To be fair, maybe the real answer is "we need to just stop listening to complaints about system design until everything is done, and then do any re-balancing afterwards." Because the systems are meant to facilitate RP, not replace it.
Tbh I have been saying this about various things since Alpha. That it is okay for staff to be like "Okay we understand there are concerns but we've reached our cap of talking them out for the time being."
@Silver said:
@silentsophia said:
Oh, here's one. Someone tells me I can't be seriously mentally ill because I have a degree. Wow. Thanks... I feel a lot better about it now...
Whoever said that hasn't met some of the scientists I have.
Whoever said that hasn't met, like. Anyone.
Is this person's ad thread really the place to hash out the eternal Mage sphere arguments?
@surreality They're my critters now. Soon as I track them down.
or, as I like to call it, "the holiday date rape song"
Yeah... you'd be wrong on that, but I'm not going to argue it with you.
Yeah, this discourse comes up every year and it's super not a date rape song, as it's based in the humor of its day often having women lean on the idea that they've had too much to drink (while being perfectly or near sober) to have an excuse to Get Busy. But it's also totally a product of the rape culture that existed then and still does now? Complicated song is complicated, but there's a lot of cultural context to it that people lose and then draw the wrong conclusions.
@Kestrel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:
I half regret that I didn't complain about him but at the same time ... I'd like to hear from staffers here. Someone you don't know joins your game and says 'your BFF here is making me extremely uncomfortable and wilfully ignoring the fact I've told him he's exacerbating my mental health issues, along with my polite requests to terminate our communications'. Whom do you believe? I didn't want to be a trouble-maker. I wanted to come to this game where no one really knows me, stay anonymous, have fun, no drama, and not rock the boat.
I've put my staff hat on with friends of mine in the past. I mean, your question isn't really "whom do you believe," because it didn't even get to a point where you knew if he was going to totally deny everything if it was brought to staff. Which he could have! But. I can say this: if someone came in with a complaint of that sort of content, yeah, I would absolutely investigate. Even if it were painful. Because if you tell someone to stop engaging with you and they continue to do so, that's a really clear boundary that's been placed and then crossed. And it's not okay. If he wholesale denied it and it became a he said/she said and nobody had logs -- well, honestly, at that point staff could still say "Okay well leave Kestrel alone in the future because that's what she wants" and then if you hadn't been logging before that point you could screenshot any further contact.
The fact that I can make Redditors SO INEXPLICABLY ANGRY when I correct someone referring to me as a "him" instead of a "her." Because OMG NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR VAGINA YOUR WOMANESS DOESN'T ADD TO THE CONVERSATION.
It's just like, wow dude you have a lot of feelings about minor conversational corrections.
Arx already lets you view your recent pages with page/last or page/list, so clearly it's saving stuff per session already.
@magee101 said in I know it's an old topic but to this day....:
@arkandel I thought the whole point of vaccination was to make you immune to the disease and stop it spreading. So either A) lotta people never got vaccinated/followed up with boosters or B) measels is evolving to combat the vaccinations
It's the first one. Vaccination rates are dropping due to bullshit false narratives about their dangers, and thus measles outbreaks are increasing.
There are also always people who can't get vaccinations for actual reasons, like being immuno-suppressed. So public health relies on everyone who can safely be vaccinated doing so.
@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
@Lisse24 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:
I do think that you can create a game culture where these extra tools are not needed. I think Arx is an excellent example of this. Arx created a game where players are reliant on each other. They've also pushed activity back to the grid, meaning that spontaneous/pick-up RP is easier to find. They've changed the game culture. However, most of the times when we have these conversations, game creators are very resistant to making the changes that Arx made.
I do believe there are some fundamental design philosophies that very between Ares and Arx. I for one would not want to see Ares adapt the level of in game tools/etc used on Arx. I think both are good at what they're aiming to provide. ETA Both have different goals/outcomes, and this is good and I support the variance.
Arx and Ares aren't equivalent concepts: Arx is a game and Ares is a codebase. It would be the difference between Evennia and Ares, and Evennia doesn't come with the amount of Arx tools coded in. Ares and Evennia definitely have different starter codebase philosophies, but there's little reason why a specific Ares game couldn't decide to build a lot of code tools if that's what worked for that specific game. I don't really imagine that Faraday has an overall goal of "don't have extensive custom coding for any game using the Ares codebase." As more games utilize Ares, I think we'll see a growing variety of custom work for it that will continue to diversify games. We're at the very beginning of seeing what fun people come up with for Ares.
FOOD
THEATRE
A lot of my consumption of FUN in NYC was performing arts, so, uh, I'm a bit biased in that direction.
I would say never grit your teeth and keep trying; IME, that just makes it all worse. Playing becomes a chore, and it'll sink your interest faster. I have better luck with telling myself it's okay to have my inspiration lapse for a while and find entertainment in other avenues aside from that particular character, that particular game, or even MU*ing in general. Even if I don't disappear from the game, I'll just stop trying to kickstart myself for a while and do other stuff instead.
Here is some text for the post previews!! I don't want to spoil anyone!! La la la la la la
***Spoilers***
It is probably worth noting that some of the people who write and/or consume fanfiction featuring child abuse (and many types of abuses) are people who actually experienced similar abuse IRL. It's not an uncomplicated issue.
@Ghost said in Fandom and entitlement:
@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:
Like, Catwoman was considered a risk, because it was a superhero movie about a POC woman (even if Halle Barry probably works for a gender flip of the "any white male, or Will Smith" criteria that movies were using in ~1998). It flopped, but that might have had more to do with the movie being steaming garbage on toast.
I don't think that Catwoman flopped or was "risky" because she was a POC. I think it's pretty well documented that it had a shitty script/screenwriting, people didn't like the character design (open for heels), and that critics butchered it in the press. At the time Halle Berry was losing her strength as a leading lady with Gothika and Die Another Day.
Hancock netted over 400 million in profits, Halle Berry was well liked in the X-Men movies, and both have a pretty loyal fan base. So when you're talking "Black Leading Actor/Actress", you gotta look at what is successful and compare it to what wasn't successful, then ask why. In Catwoman's case it's pretty clearly that it was considered all around to be a shitty film with a 9% tomatometer and 18% fan score on rotten tomatoes.
I think we all know that. It flopped because it was terrible. The point is that there's generally strong sentiment that you hear in Hollywood wherein that flop is taken as reason/excuse to "take fewer risks" on movies led by PoC and women. That is: they take the wrong lessons from it, because it's easy to just continue to add excuses to the overall pile of "if we make a movie with PoC, white people won't see it, and if we make a movie with women, men won't see it," etc.
tl;dr Hollywood is incredibly risk-averse but it's also not great at identifying its own opportunities.
I still think that this sort of code tool has the potential to enhance existing policies and game culture that is already trying to make a game safe for people to voice issues, because I think it's one of many ways for staff to project how seriously they take the issue, and making code for something explicitly informs players that they can utilize something. I would still like to see a game or two try it out. That's pretty much my opinion.
Why do people think the Y2K issues weren't real? The reason we didn't see anything seriously fuck up is because of how much work people did to prepare and update systems so they didn't break.