@faraday I'm kind of confused at your response just because you indicated earlier that you don't allow people to make PB changes after the first couple weeks for issues of continuity. How is this different? Note that we're not just talking about the first time someone picks up a roster, but also the second player, third player, etc., of that roster PC.
@three-eyed-crow I mean, I think the point is that if you pick a new PB, it needs to match the character's description. I don't think you can play the game of "authorial intent" with rosters too much, but you can play the game of "does this character resemble what's written on their sheet." (And by "resemble" I mean overall, not just physical appearance.) Rosters should be able to grow and change, absolutely! I think anyone who's played a roster game has probably had the experience of "oh a new person just picked up that cool roster! to...ignore everything on their sheet, cool" at least once.
I like rosters having PBs so long as they're also not set in stone and can be changed. Unless, like, all the rosters had terrible PBs. I'd probably judge that.
@saosmash Oh my God I would have rivalry-ed the fuck out of Talen, GET OVER HERE @Wyrdathru
@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
I do want to know that I have repeatedly said that 'if x then y' and been clear that the only evidence I have is what has been posted here. Your reading of events may be more informed than mine, and I do appreciate it, but I've been trying to keep a civil and open-minded language and did feel that you were attacking it simply because you disagreed.
Can you say where in my language I was attacking you or being uncivil?
We're retreading a misreading that others did just go through and get resolved, so it does feel a bit like you haven't actually read the thread as closely as you seem to think.
@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
@roz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
multiple posters have already talked about why it wasn't really a situation where staff could start taking people aside
That doesn't mean staff could do nothing more than remove the tool.
Which I said. And clarified. They reportedly chose not to do anything more. Their motives were made very clear, and my opinion changes none of that.
So let's please not get into the "you missed the point of x". It's a game not much better than "he-said/she-said". I saw the "point of x" and I am questioning it, disagreeing with one aspect of it.
You don't have to agree with my point, or even disagree with it for both our points to be valid.
No, I'm disagreeing with your framing of events because I think they're inaccurate. Specifically this:
@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.
Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.
It's not important if it was a purposeful dog-pile or just a bunch of people having the same opinion: it's not a fun experience either way. Staff didn't actually say that they thought 1/5th of the game's population was being abusive. They've said that if people were being abusive, they would have talked to them. But it doesn't have to have been actively abusive for it to have caused issues. The system caused issues. And yeah, I think there were people among those condemn piles who were probably active assholes about the situation, but that's not actually the point that was being made. Yes, it could have been a real opinion of the game's population. That doesn't change the fact that it was really easy for people to just toss negativity without cost or risk and for other parties to have to bear the weight of tons of people doing that without thinking. The system was unfun. It can be accurate IC, the individuals in question can not be abusive haters, and it can still cause situations that are OOCly unpleasant.
@faraday said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
I'm not sure why anonymous messengers would fall into that same category though. There's a very real difference between a gossip-y/gripe-y condemn system and and a direct message system. Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger? Because if not, then using the message system in that manner would be OOC abuse. It seems like that could be easily smacked down by staff (assuming the sends were tagged - for staff eyes only - with the sender's name).
The benefit to headache quotient there is so wildly off, though. What great value would there be in having to spend the time policing it? Keep in mind the size of the playerbase. It's just so wildly not worth it for the trouble it would cause.
@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
I said:
I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed.
If you can tell me this is exactly what happened, then so be it. With a sample size this large with the same opinion, it's hard to believe that there wasn't collusion, subconscious or otherwise. I'm not calling for a conspiracy, and certainly not across the entire set, but 40 people? Yeah, not buying it was a statistical fluke.
I mean, you're right in that I imagine there were also scenes of people expressing dislike, and I know there was plenty of OOC bitching. But does it require a bunch of collusion for 40 players to thoughtlessly sort of shoot off a 'condemn Dawn=She really sucks'? It was really easy to do without thinking about it, and I'd say that the lack of thinking or consideration required is what encouraged the volume in certain situations.
edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.
Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.
Can you take a hater and make them play nice? I don't know. I wasn't given that choice. One-fifth of the game's population was. Call it good or call it bad, I'll call it a thing that adds into the overall staff culture. It is what it is.
You're missing the actual point that's already been explicated in this thread. It's not that people didn't think it was a real opinion of the PCs being played. It wasn't that people were using condemns abusively on an individual level, hence why multiple posters have already talked about why it wasn't really a situation where staff could start taking people aside. It was that the system encouraged a thoughtless brand of negativity that offered no IC risk and yet could end up piling a huge lack of fun onto certain PCs. It wasn't that 1/5th of the game was necessarily being abusive by way of condemns. It was that the system encouraged a method of play that easily could become actively unfun for anyone in a leadership position who ended up having to make any sort of difficult position.
If you have forty people lining up to complain to one leadership PC, for those forty people it's one part of their play, for that leadership PC it's the entirety of their time. It's the same logic. And the condemn piles would also be hugely uneven based on certain factors -- COUGH GENDER COUGH -- that only added to the overall un-fun-ness of it.
@thenomain said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
@tehom said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
ike a dogpile isn't all that obvious unless you're on the receiving end of it.
A dogpile is super easy to spot if you're not the one piling on. If you are one of the people piling on, taking a step back and paying attention to those around you will also cue you in.
It actually was easy to miss with something like the condemn code, because you weren't seeing the effects except for that once a week at cron when suddenly you'll see someone at the top of the chart with something crazy like 40 condemns. It's easy to watch dogpiles in process when they're public and visible. And even that requires people to be reading those bbposts, and we know how many players don't do that at all.
When you get to have scenes so full of emotion and history, that are full of hard choices and built on several RL years of relationship history and continuity between two PCs, that are just -- so rich and layered and have so much unspoken between the lines but that so much is clear because of all the time that was spent building the dynamic...guh. So good.
@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:
I'd rather think folks are mature and adult to handle a tool, and if not, get them out of the game. If a player thinks they can't handle such a tool, then don't use it. But shaming everyone because of fringe cases seems off-base. If though folks are being jerks even after the warning, get rid of them.
You're talking as if we haven't already basically gone through this whole point. I'd like to think folks are mature and adult too, but they already proved that they weren't. It's not "shaming everyone" to say "this used to exist on the game but it was abused so they took it away."
And you're not listening to @Sunny in terms of the fact that it doesn't actually require all these people to be active assholes; it just requires a number of people to be thoughtless for it to become a serious weight of unfun on others who are receiving high volumes.
@ominous Yeah I'm aware. Well, I'm aware that Darren tried to abstain because he decided that the months everyone had had to look into matters was inadequate but the vote had already been put off for way too long so people had to vote and so he had to pick a side and thus picked not doing it. The only person who really emphatically voted against it was Edain.
@jeshin said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers:
Why did condemn get taken away? I vaguely remember it happening after Dawn said she arranged for people to pay the tiend even though all the Peerage picked one person per house to sacrifice or something. I could be totally wrong but that feels like the event that triggered some kind of condemn drama.
It happened around that time but that's not an accurate retelling of those particular events with Dawn. (The High Lords voted to pay the Teind in general, there were no decisions made about who would pay the Teind, other than I think Niccolo publicly volunteering himself or whatever. But Dawn had a group ready to go and promptly went once the High Lords voted for the Compact to pay it.)
Anyways yes anonymous messengers would be awful for the same reason condemn turned out to be awful. They'd just be another way to pile onto someone with no risk of IC reprisal.
I think 80 is the max value possible in the sub-equation of that, so 100/80 which is 1.25. Might round down I guess!
@shincashay I don't know if 1 AP is possible. The formula is in help action points, though:
Sharing a clue costs an amount based on your social stats, social skills, and investigation skill (100/(social stats + social skills + investigation * 3)).
I think raising Investigation is the most efficient way to lower clue share costs. I'd have to math out what it would be if you had max social stats, skills, and investigation, though, so see the total lowest potential cost.
@ominous Yeah I'm not hugely sympathetic to the idea of "I wanted to have this but I didn't want other people to have it unless I decided they could."
@ominous said in Arx: @clues:
@bananerz Apparently you weren't around for the first three months or so of clues when people had diarrhea of the mouth when it came to clues. Every scene had someone who was offering every single clue they had. I ended up with like 100 over the course of this time. Staff ended up putting an AP cost to it, which cut down on the sharing, but there was a brief bit of unhappiness at the cost being added.
I think you mean MASSIVE WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH jfc I remember those reactions still
@arkandel said in Arx: @clues:
@darinelle said in Arx: @clues:
As a player I LOVE theories.
I haven't played on Arx in a long time so this might be different now, but what I didn't like about it was people theorycrafting over pages or channels, or even at times breaking into OOC conversations in the middle of RP to the detriment of actually playing the game.
Note that she's talking specifically about @theories code, which is IC, not conversational OOC theorycrafting.
I rarely come across people hoarding clues. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places? For the most part I encounter people who are happy to share with clues with me. I am happy to share clues with other! The number of clues that I won't share is very small, and that's just because it's info my character wouldn't share in the first place because it's super secret or dangerous. But I could probably count those clues on one hand.
Clue sharing is actually one of the best ways to get players involved in something.
Also my clues are already in a database called EVERNOTE.
ETA: Wow thanks for randomly replying to this thread, phone. Uh. Maybe I'll be back on a real keyboard.