Posts made by saosmash

In my experience generally what you need to do is:

a.) Have a fun concept that will attract attention
b.) Have committed staffers who are into the said concept
c.) make a committed effort to having an accessible game with an understandable website/wiki
d.) advertise actively both on games that allow ad sharing, communities like this one, and if your game is fandom-based, in the fandom where the fans live.

It also helps in my experience to have somebody on staff who is a marketing professional and knows stuff about marketing but I do understand that not everyone can have a @Roz.

@skew That's my network too! Sigh.

Oh man, I totally forgot that there are games who don't have a public alts policy.

I tried to play this game and it froze every time I caught a pokemon. Let me know when they've updated/patched it enough to be stable and maybe I'll try again.

I think players have some obligation to make their own fun but I also think that staff has an obligation to run story that will shape the game in the direction staff hopes players will go. I also find that an engaged staff leads to an engaged playerbase and vice versa (of course there are some exceptions to this rule as with any generalization).

But I find as a staffer that when I (or my fellow staffers) am not actively creating story players will do stuff but mostly it will consist of making out with each other. Which don't get me wrong I'm fine with! But do staffers really get in the way of player initiative?

I can usually maintain 2 alts' worth of activity without difficulty. I've got 4 on TLF right now -- this happens when I get really invested in a game and can't make the character concepts in my head go away. Our activity requirements for non-responsibility-having PCs are pretty light, so I manage it without much difficulty. In terms of creating meaningful relationships with that many characters ... well, I conveniently RP each alt more when the players who have meaningful relationships with those characters are available!

Now when I get the character creation urge, I write plot and put NPCs in it. (This backfires -- my fourth alt on TLF was a NPC from a plot I ran that I loved so much I couldn't get over my desire to keep her.)

I see no reason whatsoever to limit people who have the time and attention to spend on a character and aren't creating problems. And if they are creating problems, I don't see how more characters or less characters is going to make a difference. Assholes gonna asshole. If a player's a pain in the ass, how are they less of a pain in the ass if they only have one character? What I do find annoying is when people app a million characters and then idle on all of them, which is why reasonable alt restrictions I'm in favor of, because this slows up the bus and interferes with other people's play. But if that's not happening who cares if someone is playing 2 or 3 instead of 1?

If they're meeting activity requirements and enjoying the story, great. It means there's more variety of characters doing stuff. To be frank, I probably wouldn't even app on a game that required one character only per player, not because I always have the urge to alt immediately (I don't), but because it reflects an attitude that isn't compatible with my playstyle.

But I've never played WoD in my life and as much as I've read about it on these threads I still don't have that clear idea of what all y'all get up to.

Aw man I would but at four dogs and a cat I think we're at capacity. Best of luck!

@Roz You mean different from the movie somehow...?

But seriously -- I feel like I'd be way more chill with a post-canon game that included FCs this way than one AU canon. I love Dragon Age and I love FCs (my one finished fic!) but I feel like it's a difficult game barrier to leap over.

As an ex-staffer on a since-closed Mass Effect game, I wish you guys the absolute best of luck but I'm afraid I'm gonna join the others on this thread who are a bit over the setting/theme choice here.

@Kanye-Qwest Perhaps with just a soupcon of passive aggressiveness?

I feel like we've done a fair to decent job of this on TLF (Transformers Lost and Found) by a.) "Hiring" dedicated staff for the purpose and b.) getting brand spanking new player input on building easy cheat sheets for other brand spanking new newbies to use figuring out MUSH. It helped a lot because we've all been doing this shit so long we felt myopic about what exactly newbies really need to know to figure out the interface (sorry, as I type this I realize I'm crossing the streams again).

I was actually really bummed that I couldn't stop buying Cap when this happened but I already stopped buying Cap back when Remender was shitting all over it.

I've basically already upvoted everything @roz said about the whole kerfuffle so I don't know that I need to say more. I was pretty furious when I read an interview with Spencer that addressed the anti-semitism thing directly and he was basically like, "Just trust Brevoort! He's been in the business for years! He wouldn't let me do anything to destroy the character!"

Man, fuck you, I'm not gonna trust Brevoort. The last big dumb anti-Semitic thing that happened in comics was Remender on Brevoort's watch and he was just as dismissive then as he is now.

WHY ARE YOU GUYS ALL SO CLUELESS. COME ON MARVEL I GIVE YOU SO MUCH MONEY.

Yeah, I don't really feel like there's a one-size-fits-all to poses or RP. It's not the meat, it's the motion!!

We've been using a season structure for our metaplot on one of my games and I'm really enjoying it. It translates so well to this medium and leaves a lot of room for flexibility while still providing direction. I mean, mileage may vary -- I'm staffing the game so I don't know what the PrP opinion is -- but I think it's been a really successful experiment in terms of structure. A lot better than stuff I've tried to do in the past with broad sweeping arcs.

XFNYC (http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) is the superhero game. I guess "superhero" is kind of a strong word because, as aforementioned: losers.

I'm playing the fuck out of Transformers: losers in space. I'm slightly less engaged but also playing with weird mildly cyberpunky street level mutant superheroes who are also mostly losers.

Oh my God I can't even imagine working out while talking to clients. I mean I hate talking to clients and I hate working out so this sounds like a recipe for like exponential disaster.

Personally the code you're describing is a huge selling point for me -- I miss toys!! -- but I fear that I am not going to be able to sustain three games. >.>

I don't do this to cashiers because it feels invasive to go after their tag but do historically sometimes go 'Hi, <name>!' when the waiter tells the table their name. It usually makes them laugh but maybe I'm annoying and they just don't know how else to react. I CAN STOP. Are there waiters here who want me to stop doing this?

I feel like some metaplot from staff is critical if only because without the framing story most PrPs are going to be wandering in the dark. But flexibility from staff and availability for PrPs to happen is also necessary because it's critical that player initiative not be stifled for a game to chug along at a healthy intensity.

This is essentially how we handled canon FCs for our Mass Effect original character theme @ Alpha & Omega and it worked very well.