Best posts made by Roz

Lol, all I can think of with the idea of "have to wear it for a certain period of time" is that truly high-end fashionistas would never wear the same outfit multiple days in a row.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

@Roz said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

@Coin said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

@Roz said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

I have a half-baked idea but it involves -- if there's gonna be sheets, and stats for bending expertise, it would also be cool if people could spend XP on the other bending styles (other than their own) as an indicator of how well they've studied those styles to counter. (I thought of this after being reminded of a scene early in S1 on TLA where Aang is chatting with the Fire Nation guards while captured and is all "Huh you guys have probably never fought an Air Bender, huh." A big part of Aang's effectiveness in the series ended up just being that people had totally lost the experience of studying the styles of air bending.)

My custom-baked Avatar system has as its core Attributes the four elements + Spirit, and each one governs something different (Fire is Power; Water is Change; Earth is Temperance; Air is Freedom ...) and when you bend you roll the appropriate Attribute, but having the others is part of everyone; everyone has a little bit of each element; Benders just channel their main one into their Bending Art. What you're suggesting would be represented by having better levels of the others to better understanding the theory behind other Bending techniques.

Mm, I guess. My line of thinking would be more about the skill end of things. Like if you have the elements as attributes, I feel like you'd want to also have skills to represent developing the actual techniques. Like how Katara had plenty of waterbending potential from the start of the show (attribute, in your example), but she had to learn how to use it (skill, in mine). What I'm talking about would specifically be about learning technique.

Yeah, the actual bending styles are pretty obviously based on different stances of kung fu/martial arts. Being able to study those even without the bending would make sense.

Yeah, and Iroh -- and subsequently Zuko, as his student -- is shown as being a legendary bender in part because he has studied and adapted elements of other bending styles to his own. Plus pro benders are obviously going to have professional need to study other styles just for their sport.

To my memory, the reason for not locking the initial ad posts was so that people could ask game questions and have them answered. Which is not an endorsement or condemnation, but I think at least one person was like "I don't know why they don't just lock the threads." I believe that was the idea.

As has been said, there's no point in trying to legislate each and every thing that's not allowed on your game. People generally know when they're being an asshole, whether you made a rule against that particular kind of behavior or not. I believe strongly in more general "don't be an asshole" rules when it comes to general behavior. (I know there are also more specific rules when it comes to stats, sheets, etc. This is different.) The more specific your rules in regards to behavior, the more you'll get asshole players who will toe the line just shy of crossing it while laughing at you on the other side. I've staffed on games where we've been reluctant to bring in people acting like assholes for a staff chat just because they aren't explicitly breaking rules, and it sucks. A lot. Everyone ends up frustrated, because you feel impotent as a staffer.

Here's what I feel like you owe players: a general sense and appearance of transparency, even-handedness, and fairness. I believe strongly that the appearance of fairness is just as important as fairness in practice. Here's what you don't owe players: constant negotiation, an ear for every complaint, to staff exactly how they want you to staff, or constant satisfaction or happiness. It's much more important that you and whomever you choose to staff with are in agreement about what game you're running and how you run it than to try and make your game fit what every single player wants your game to be. Stick to a vision and a general philosophy, and the players who like your idea will stick around, the players who don't like it will leave.

My parents used to describe their parenting style with me and my three brothers as "we don't negotiate with terrorists." I think it's pretty relevant to staffing, too. You owe it to players to be reasonable and forthright. You don't owe players constant negotiation. You make the rules for your own game. It's not about not listening to players, it's about being able to recognize workable issues versus whining. There are people who just need to whine, but you don't have to sit there and be their receptacle for it. I like to think of staffing as a benevolent dictatorship. I want to cultivate the kind of game where people feel comfortable and chill and have a good time, but at the end of the day, I'm in charge and you're not.

I definitely agree with the previously-stated sentiments of praise in public/chastise in private. I believe super strongly in staff confidentiality. I don't think that general complaints of "this guy's being an asshole a lot" mean that those players lodging complaints should necessarily be privy to the details of how staff handled the issue. This is different for more serious cases of abuse or harassment, but for me that's a more immediate bannable offensive, and I do feel that when it comes to bans, going public with certain information is appropriate. I mean, for me, you have to be a real shit to warrant a ban, and the game deserves to know what kind of behavior warrants such a reaction from staff, IMO. (Full disclosure, I've never actually had to ban a player or been a part of a staff that banned someone during my tenure. I did staff on a game that had a major banning of a very involved player a year or two prior to my joining the game.)

I totally get being sensitive about feeling like you have complaints from all angles. I don't know how to teach someone to reduce their number of fucks, because I've always just had a certain talent for it when it comes to stuff like this. Like, in some ways I totally believe that my job is not about pleasing players; it's about creating a good game. I feel like that maybe makes me sound like a total tyrant, but it's more about recognizing which complaints are actionable and which are whining.

You will never, ever, ever please all players. Some players are just not meant to be pleased. Empower yourself with that knowledge!

Yeah, I believe the concern is about number of players instead of number of alts.

(Also FWIW in general to people I don't think staff plans to engage much on MSB so actual players with questions about stuff on the game are probably more likely to get official answers on the game itself.)

@lemon-fox No idea! I don't use MUSHClient. You'd be looking for an option to highlight things based on a regex, which I'm very un-expert with. And I know there are different types of regexes? Or something? Like the Atlantis ones won't work in Potato? They have different engines or -- something. Someone told me the answer to this once.

Based on this page I found googling, you can indeed do regex highlights on MUSHClient, so you'd have to explore and figure it out.

@Shebakoby said:

The bottom line is when you accept banned players, you don't always know what the truth is regarding their situations. Sure, some are actually guilty of what they were accused. Some were not. There has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff while not being unfair to the wheat.

Banned players who were banned for legitimate reasons almost always reveal their colors on new games. You don't need a probationary period to identify them and deal with them.

@kumakun Like this:

@Arkandel Yes. I've even got a weird apparently-benign mutation in my retinas. I WAS BORN THIS WAY.

Board: OOC Stuff, Post Number: 99
Poster: Pax
Subject: Atlantis 64-bit Release Candidate
Date: 07/29/19 04:22:41

Yeah, this isn't (directly) Arx-related; if you aren't a macOS user, or you don't use the Atlantis MU* client on macOS, feel free to skip the rest of this post.

I know some of you out there use the Atlantis MU* client which I wrote. Which was written long enough ago that it wasn't 64-bit, and thus will die horribly when the next version of macOS comes out this fall and kills off 32-bit support.

I've been taking a bit of time to try to get Atlantis updated for 64-bit, and it's mostly there now; it doesn't (yet) work with Dark Mode, and there's a last few tweaks I want to make (like getting a newer automated update framework in place), but I'd like any Atlantis users who are feeling brave and/or helpful to give this build a try and see whether or not there's anything horrifically wrong with it. It seems to work fine on both my Mojave installation and my Catalina developer release, but different machines cause different quirks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/clhapmluhij88bt/Atlantis-0.9.9.6-rc5.zip?dl=0

Cheers, and thank you for anyone willing to pitch in and give it a test run for me. Thanks!

Time to @ everyone here I've TSed with, since I now have a newfound relationship with all of you!

Magic things MediaWiki does that make it worthwhile:

Semantic MediaWiki combined with DPL. This is the thing that basically turns your entire wiki into a searchable database. All the fields you expect on a character page -- name, age, height, etc. -- or a log page -- participants, location, date, etc. -- become searchable and sortable properties. This is what made it so that @Tat could make a custom log search function that lets you search by date range, people in the scene, etc. It's what lets out organization pages remain largely untouched, because people can just mark their current or former associations, and we can build auto-generating lists of either that update themselves. This is, IMO, the big huge thing that MediaWiki has on Wikidot. It's definitely not true that Wikidot can do all of the things that any game wiki would want to do, because both of my games -- X-Factor and Lost and Found -- use extensions and functionality that Wikidot doesn't offer. Of course, do you need all those things? Not necessarily. Will you become pretty much addicted to them if you start using them as a wiki admin? Probably.

The other big one for us is Semantic Forms. This is the answer to every player who goes "oh I'm so bad at wikis, I don't want to make my page, I just break everything." Build a template, then build a form to fill out the template. It's a lot more user-friendly than the autofilled templates, it's harder for players to break, and players also have to work a lot harder to change up the page template if you're a game has a standardized template you don't want to change up (which both of mine do -- I don't care about player creativity here, sorry).

Again, do you absolutely need all these things to house a functional game wiki? No. Does it make the experience better both on the admin and user ends? IMO, yeah. It's incredibly useful for organizing plot pages -- you can autofeed logs that are associated with the plot, add people who were on the plot so that the plot shows up on their character pages as something they participated in, etc., etc. If you're a game that has a lot of plot threads, it can be incredibly useful for keeping things organized.

And hey, I know that I suggested a few of these things to @surreality and now she's in love with them as much as I am, so clearly they're awesome. I bet I can summon Tat to this thread to expound at length, too.

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

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

"you're too emotional" is a common derailing tactic in debate used against women who express any sort of investment in what they're arguing about.

Which would be more valid if he implied it was because she was a woman, and not just a person getting emotional.

Telling someone you believe they are getting to emotional is perfectly fine. I think that people are reading some kind of sexism into the statement that Thenomain didn't put in there.

People, regardless of sex, can in fact be getting too emotional.

He wanted to know why people were reacting the way they were, and I was just explaining, since he asked for further explanation.

@Godot said in Mass Effect MU*?:

@Roz said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Sorry we closed Alpha & Omega

I respect that decision. If there is a certain story central to the game, closing after it's over is for the best.

Well, we actually made the decision because the game was running out of steam, but we closed with some big, epic plots, so it probably looked like we were closing at the end of our story. We wanted to give it a nice ending!

ONE of the names used -- Shadow -- was one PC of a guy on Arx who was banned for creeping and stalking and then proceeded to literally stalk staff and players on social media, spent a lot of time connecting as a guest to hurl abuse in random pages and the like, etc. I did assume Skew was using that one to purposefully reference that guy, who was like a hugely overt terrible person. I am not particularly concerned with protecting that particular player's identity or whatever as his issues were numerous and well-documented.

I have NO idea about the other one or whatever situation Scorn seems to be referring to, which sounds different.

As someone who has now used Evennia a good deal as a player on Arx and Ares a little bit as a brief player on Faraday's game, I'd LOVE if Evennia had the same thing as Ares where all the commands don't have prefixes. Like, even the basic globals set up in Evennia now have some with @ by default and some without. Just knock everything off. Why not at least standardize so they all start the same? There are some touches in Ares like that that really seem to be specifically about "Making things easier/simpler/more streamlined for the user."

(Also, letting players set a color for quoted text like Ares officially does now would be the bEST.)

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

Example: You're going to have about as few likely LGBTQ characters represented in a MUSH that takes place in 1941 Berlin as you are going to have allowed Neo-Nazi characters in Fights n' Tights.

I'm confused at this example. Do you think queer people didn't exist in Germany in 1941?

Anyways I will gladly accept the accusation of bias in regards to favoring representation for marginalized communities and not representation for genocidal hate groups. I am biased, I admit it.

This and this is how I laptop in bed, by the way. (Sprawling on my stomach is uncomfortable for me for whatever reason.)

fuck you sir