@ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:
I just watched Into the Spider-Verse, and my mind is blown.
As a huge fan of Miles and Gwen in their respective comics, I really loved their portrayals in this; I'd happily go back and see the film a second time.
@paris said in Mu* Clients for new iPad Pro?:
If you can afford a windows-based tablet, I'd suggest that instead, since you can game on them, mush on them, and in many cases now, draw on them. Getting a clip-on or bluetooth keyboard is not very expensive.
I will actually note that the Surface line is great. (Though alas, the Surface Pro doesn't work so well in a lap with the keyboard case.)
@kanye-qwest said in Mu* Clients for new iPad Pro?:
@sparks I mean yay but MAGIC and EXPLORING
Yeah, I sort of got eaten by Arxcode...
Atlantis does not run on iOS, no. (Assuming I ever finish the complete 2.0 rewrite, that is written to run on both macOS and iOS.)
Honestly, the issue is that we kind of tried, as an experiment, to engage with the thread as a primary source of system design feedback when—as @Thenomain says—it was more a theorycrafting thread and not meant for Arx staff. (This one's largely on me, since I'm the one who really decided to try to engage with folks in hopes of getting concrete feedback before redoing the system.)
However, a lot of this thread has not been actionable suggestions, which... well, after all, it's more a theorycrafting and analysis thread, rather than something focused solely on how to improve things to make stuff more fun for players, which is the focus I needed in my redesign work.
(This isn't to say there haven't been some good suggestions in the thread—definitely ones that we'll be taking into account for prestige/modeling/etc. reworking—but it's not the focused type of feedback that I was looking for.)
Further, it's kind of occurred to staff that "let's pull suggestions from threads on a random forum out there on the internet" isn't really the best path, since that excludes anyone on the game who doesn't have an account here from weighing in on the conversation. Whereas there's a system discussions board on the game itself where everyone on game can, well, discuss systems, which makes a lot more sense to use.
(Plus, beyond the system discussion board on game, I certainly try to always be accessible via page when online, as does Apostate. We may not always be unidle—especially me, if I'm working on code, since I can get Very Deeply Engrossed in my PyCharm window—but I usually try to keep an eye on the staff window when online. So there are avenues to offer suggestions that aren't just 'Discord one of the staffers' or something similar.)
This isn't to say that people can't distill ideas from this thread and post 'em to the system design board on game as suggestions—in fact, that would be awesome, so that really good feedback doesn't get missed—just that we really shouldn't be acting like this thread is a good 'main feeder source' of suggestions on system design, when—again, as Thenomain said—the thread isn't really meant for us.
Staff more formally bowing out is meant more because we kind of had been engaging to a degree that some folks kind of had gotten the idea that this thread was the primary avenue of feedback on system design... which it really shouldn't be.
@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@sparks said in The Arx Peeve Thread:
But telling other people that their fun is "wrong"—that they need to adjust their sheet or their very concept to be more "effective" mathematically instead of playing the thing they want to play—is what staff's really not okay with.
"Oh, you need to be a combat character, social stuff isn't really useful."
"Oh, you want to do market stuff? You need to pick these specific skills, in this specific order, or else you aren't maximizing your effectiveness and XP spends; if you do anything else, you're just wrong about it."
Being pressed on those things is not usually fun for the people who are being told they're "doing it wrong", when they have a character concept they want to play. It's especially bad if it happens to someone brand-new to the game who doesn't know any better.
If you don't want people to feel pressured to optimize characters this or that way, why are the game systems built to give such massive advantages to specialized characters? Almost all Arx systems involve high base difficulties combined with massive multipliers.
I wasn't staff back in alpha so I can't speak to decisions early on, but I played in the latter part of alpha and I saw a fair number of people complain that specialization/high skills didn't matter enough, and so there was no advantage to playing specialized characters. So I suspect some of that fed into the system designs going into beta.
And honestly? There should be some advantage to playing a specialist; someone who is focused solely on combat should be better at it than someone who's a combat-social-crafter (and also dabbles in occult lore on the side). Otherwise there's no purpose to character concepts who do specialize.
To me, I feel like it'd be disheartening to be someone whose whole Thing
—whole character concept—is this one niche area, only to have someone else who's a total generalist who does All The Things blow you away at your one thing you wanted to shine at.
And there's a difference between "if you specialize in this system/archetype, you will be significantly more effective" (which, I think, has a place in systems) and players telling other players "oh, social skills aren't useful at all; you should play combat" or otherwise insisting someone has to play a given way (which is what the post you are quoting from is referencing, in particular referencing a specific instance of precisely that happening). I feel like you've mistakenly conflated the two things here.
I mean, not everyone cares whether their sheet is optimized to eke every single last silver from the market; some just want to be able to haggle at a decent level as part of their character concept. Insisting they have to do it that way or they're doing it wrong is really unfriendly to other players, especially new ones. People have remarked on that in this very thread, that they don't care about whether they're super-uber-optimized down to the last possible point of XP.
Now, perhaps some of that benefit to specialization is too high! It's possible. System balance is not an exact science, since so much of it relies on player feel, and no system design ever completely survives contact with the playerbase.
But I am willing to bet you that that if we stripped those benefits out—if there was no significant, tangible benefit to specializing in a given area—people would howl about that too, and about how now the only thing that makes sense is being a generalist because having level 5 in something is worthless.
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.
@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@dontpanda said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
When someone tells me they can fold a fitted sheet:
I CAN.
@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
So we could. We tried that. And yet we still heard all the time that it was happening, and the people who DID want fashion felt bad enough that they might be keeping someone from getting THE BEST ARMOR to help the House that they wouldn't even ask, or - and this is the worst part - it was just accepted as the Way Things Were and that's the culture that was spread where staff wasn't aware of it.
Which is why the goal is—as I noted earlier—to make all the player archetypes have a potential use to the other archetypes so that this sort of blocking doesn't happen, because there's always a benefit to facilitating other people's RP.
So we want things for combat characters to do, and we have some; Champions can duel, and people can spar, and combat will be important in Shardhavens, and combat can sometimes be fairly important in GM'd scenes that turn to conflict. Non-combat people have reasons to seek out combat characters, and their families have reason to fund their gear and training.
And we want things for crafters to do. We have some, yes, but we want the things they make—not just weapons, but all the crafted goods—to have relevance to the game world. Which is one reason modeling is actually a potentially important system. When the crafted goods are useful, non-crafters have reasons to seek out crafters.
We want things for mental characters to do, so we have the investigation system, helping to solve puzzles in Shardhavens, and such. So people have reasons to seek out mental characters, good investigators, and to help facilitate their RP avenues. This is one we could possibly add a few more hooks for, but the investigation system is a pretty important avenue; it still gives a good reason for non-mental characters to seek out good investigators.
We want things for social characters to do... and right now, this is one of the places where things fall down. Without value to the prestige system, there's little reason for the non-social characters to seek out socially-focused characters, or to facilitate their RP avenues by giving them money for clothing and jewelry, or to host events, etc. Hence why prestige tied into other systems.
@pyrephox said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
So, I guess I'd turn it around and say, when you say you want social characters to have meaningful systems to interact with, what sorts of systems do you envision as "meaningful" in the context of the sort of game staff wants Arx to be? Like, if you didn't have to code anything, and could just wave your hand and declare, "This is what social power MEANS in this setting," then what would it be?
That's a fair question. What I as a system designer would like is that prestige—both legend and fame—boils down to "you have influence with the NPC populace in various ways".
Now, note that prestige may not be from social sources; it might be because you're a Champion who just won a prominent bout and is enjoying your fifteen minutes of fame in the aftermath, or it might be because you're a social maven who spends a lot of time keeping yourself in the public eye. Where the prestige comes from should be irrelevant in this sense; social characters should just find it easier to maintain that fame.
As for how that influence looks?
ETA a reply I missed before!
@three-eyed-crow said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Without answering that, the prestige list will not matter to people, and houses will go back to "no, you can't have money for clothes or jewelry, we need to keep the funds for weaponry" (which is what happened before).
Can't staff make it clear this isn't cool and punish people who do it when they are reported?
Sure, but I would rather have a system that makes people want to fund and facilitate the fun of their social characters than having to constantly police it and have the house leaders resentful about the social characters "sucking up money for stuff that doesn't matter".
A system is more work in the short term, yes, but a lot less staff work in the long run.
@pyrephox I don't disagree; the issue I see is that "singling someone out to the NPCs" needs to be something that has a meaningful system tied to it. If social characters are only useful in GM'd actions ("I'm pointing out that Gertrude is starting an evil cult in her backyard!") that doesn't give them a lot to do in their downtime.
Simply generating social resources isn't going to do much for them either, especially because "you can make a resource for me" is just a grindy system where people use social characters like vending machines, which probably won't be fun either.
I want social characters to always have an advantage for staying on the buzz list, because they know how to manage their fame and publicity. Given that, what can being on that list let them do without requiring GM attention (like actions would)?
Without answering that, the prestige list will not matter to people, and houses will go back to "no, you can't have money for clothes or jewelry, we need to keep the funds for weaponry" (which is what happened before).
The design goal is not just to make a meaningless leaderboard, but to give a reason that people will want to have social characters in their house, just like how people want to have combat characters in their house for combatty things. Or if they don't have social folks in their own house, a reason to hire social characters—Whispers, for instance—for social things, just like people hire Champions or mercenaries for duels and combat.
The problem is that by making social characters important to existing systems people feel like they have to be social characters, because people in general are stressing that "if you aren't a social character, you aren't maximizing your prestige gains, and if you aren't maximizing your prestige gains you're not maximizing your gains in other systems, and that means you're doing it wrong". (And whether or not that's the intention, focusing on 'what is the most effective way to use the system' with examples given in math is going to add to that flailing.)
At any rate, the entire thing clearly has turned the whole thing into a source of frothing stress for people in about seven different ways, rather than something fun to make social characters useful to non-social characters.
What I, as a coder looking to redesign things, would like to see is suggested solutions to that actual design goal and problem (hence the 'constructive' in the thread title), so that I can deal with it and get back to the magic system. I've got one in mind, as I've detailed, but that doesn't mean people's input might not be useful.
However, any solution kind of needs to be at a more macro level—this isn't about "what can be tuned in modeling", this is at a higher level; "what will make social characters fun and useful to other people" is the question that we want to answer.
That's why I personally feel that the math behind things is secondary to this consideration. Raw math—or focusing on how you maximize your gains in a mechanical sense—is not going to make social characters feel useful. Worse still, any system where people feel you have to read the system math in order to "maximize" your gains is not going to be fun for people. (Thus why I'm going to try to remove numbers from the scoreboard and from viewing your own prestige in the rewrite.)
@roz said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@sparks I think that uncoupling -- or reducing -- the connection between house prestige and house income would go a long way as a stopgap. I think that's a really huge area where it kind of comes down to people feeling a lot of pressure, and I think it's a really big area in which the "prestige is a minigame" intent can fail. (Then again, the potential pitfall of that is then it becomes -- what value is social stuff bringing the house at all to encourage houses to support their social PC projects?)
This is something I've already discussed with Apos. I think we're going to integrate it in dominion down the road, rather than trying to graft it into the current bits of dominion.
So instead of affecting income, having someone with high prestige as a sort of 'spin doctor' to assist with any dominion rolls will lower the difficulty of dominion rolls by an amount based on their prestige. Thus making having a social maven in your family—or hiring a Whisper—still have a lot of value, but hardly something that should feel "required".
@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Why not just remove the scoreboard thus obfuscating prestige during tuning?
Because at this point the system seems irrevocably tainted by bitterness and general unhappiness, as people have worked themselves into a froth. Removing the scoreboards would not stop this; people would still be unhappy with the current system even if they no longer had numbers to point to. Gutting it and restarting with a system that implements all of prestige (fashion, tournaments, etc.) in an extensible manner to start with, rather than a foundation of one system (fashion) with others (tournaments, etc.) coming later seems like the best way to balance things out.
It seems odd that staff would halt the development of magic, possibly the most sought after system or shardhavens (automated dungeons)
Dealing with people arm-flailing about prestige is eating a not-insignificant amount of staff time at this point. People argue in the threads here, get more and more worked up, and then come to staff with (often contradictory) pages or @mails of "this is how I think prestige should be redesigned right now".
Hence, prestige got bumped up the list of things to deal with in order to reduce the staff workload in the longer term, so we can get back to story.
Conversely, magic is eating rather less staff time, because generally PCs don't have access to magic right now; people can try horrifically dangerous experiments through @action and eat up one of their GM slots, or try to attach themselves to one of the NPC teachers in advance of the magic system going in, but that's pretty much it at present.
As much as I'd really like to get into the stories of people learning magic and all—because that's where my interest as a GM really rests—it's something that can wait because the current state is not a drain on staff like the prestige system has become.
@mietze said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Maybe we should get rid of the leaderboards since they seem to be used as a reason to be shitty to other people and to get resentful or think that if you don't have 6s in everything that you are useless
I plan to remove score entirely and replace it with buzz and legend commands which will break things down more organically.
So buzz might show "Who's Being Talked About Right Now" and list things like "Joe, a celebrated fashion icon" or "Sara, a celebrated Champion" or "Fred, a well-known event host", using a value range (X to Y being 'celebrated', and so on) and the largest source of your recent fame. Fame would still decay, so people would fall off the list.
Similarly, legend would show things like "Sara, hero of the Battle of Examplis" or whatever, or "Tommy, owner of the Blade of Destiny" or whatever, to break down why people are on the legend list. Legend won't decay, but will be much harder to gain.
My hope is that by taking the overly-precise-seeming numbers out of the system entirely, it will let people focus on the end result and use it to spur RP, rather than everything else.
I'm also going to add a nominate command so that people can nominate other players for manual adjustments over things staff might've missed, which hopefully will let people feel like the coded systems aren't the only avenues to gain prestige.
@caryatid said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Let it be a month-long story-only request so that those of us uninterested in code, numbers, min/maxing, etc. can have the forward momentum on our RP that we'd like to see when we engage with the game.
On a personal level, I was hoping to have magic and Shardhavens live by mid-February, and put some focus into storytelling using those systems; the prestige system does not interest me, on a personal level as a GM and as a system designer, nearly as much as those systems do. So I admit I'm a little sad we've sidelined into prestige being the Single Most Important Thing on the game; it was meant to just be a minigame people could participate in, and one that would make social characters valuable to their houses.
But it seems likely the prestige rework will save a lot of hard feelings and hopefully provide new outlets for a lot of folks, so it's not like it's a bad thing to put time into. And prestige systems will be more immediately accessible to people than magic and Shardhavens, so it'll probably affect more of the game more immediately.
@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Is it worthwhile? I don't know, often trying to discourage 'cheating' makes things a lot less enjoyable for everyone else who just want to have fun. Are people making items named 'for modeling' and junking them a real issue?
It was something we noticed happening, albeit not commonly; it was a hole in the system we thus thought we should close. Making the modeling stuff have a big benefit for running it in public was the response to that, as I detailed before, to encourage people to make real outfits to show off. But it seems that the fuss that's caused—having modeling be something you do in public rather than privately in your rooms—is far worse than the initial problem of people gaming the edge case of the system.
Hence why I'm going to gut and rewrite the prestige system to handle a bunch of things—including modeling—differently. As part of that overall rewrite, among other changes, modeling will no longer have to happen in public. This means modeling won't be nearly as rewarding any longer—since as part of those changes there won't be any benefit for doing it at a large event for an adoring crowd of prominent citizens—but hopefully it reduces people's pain points and encourages the use of modeling again.
(Staff's got some other ideas on a different system to make it worthwhile to show off things in public—and make social resources a little more useful, while we're at it—but they're still in a sort of half-gelled state right now, and not quite ready to detail.)
@sunny said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
How about if you junk a dress, you can make another dress from it, but it becomes junked silk instead of new silk and it can't be used for model clothes, just wearing clothes.
This would require a not-insignificant reworking of part of the crafting system in a manner that kind of makes me cry (basically allowing multiple material types for a recipe and then having some sort of conditional tag based on what materials were used), and... well, I do want to get back to Shardhavens and magic eventually! 
@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@saosmash said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
People definitely know that modeling exists, though. This is a reduction in numbers from people using the command before.
Before people could run the command in the privacy of their own homes couldn't they? It's a pretty big ask for most people to have to be at a big event to run a command.
I do think the intention of making it so people were modeling actual outfits (not just privately modeling things named "-" or "shirt" or "for model" that were then immediately recycled) by making you model in front of others kind of backfired in ways we didn't intend; seeing the use of modeling go down—even though the rewards are potentially higher—suggests people don't like the idea of public scenes being required.
So I'm probably going to back out the public aspect of modeling as part of the prestige changes I'm working on.
As Apos suggests, though, we're still going to want to come up with some kind of public fashion thing so that people can engage with the system in public, and some way to incentivize real outfits over throwaway. Ideas are being tossed around by staff, but they still need to "gel" a bit more before I think they can be detailed here.
@pyrephox said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
When I try to critique Arx's systems, though, it's always with a caveat that there are at least two huge systems which currently don't exist, but which are likely to change everything else around, in terms of character resources and actions: Dominion and Magic. And I can't even say that I know enough of what those are going to look like to speculate on their effects.
The magic system is actually in the codebase already, so the basic design is done, though there may still be tuning to do; there's a few knobs I still want to twist and fiddle with to dial in balance better. (I also wrote up a guide to magic ahead of time, in hopes it'll make the system more approachable when it does go live.)
However, I've put aside finishing up the system, in particular the coded effects and consequences—the building blocks that get put together to make the results of magic—to look at redoing Prestige instead, since Prestige seems to be such a pain point for people right now.
@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@pyrephox Yes. I don't honestly find this kind of display very constructive, because the projected margin is so slim it's in 'who gives a damn' territory, but is presented in a way that all but begs for interpretation by people who don't want to math out the systems as "oh no if I don't do this right I am at a big disadvantage".
My thought is that if people are going to focus specifically on the math of a system in a constructive criticism thread, I feel like it should be coupled with an explanation of what they think needs to change in that math and why. Even there, though, it's going to be a pretty niche discussion; I mean, no offense meant to those who derive their enjoyment of the game from optimizing the math, but I feel like a better focus for a constructive criticism thread is looking at the systems at a macro level to see what stymies engagement (or, conversely, makes people feel like engagement is required, which should not be the case).
If people aren't using haggle, why not? If people are no longer using modeling, why not? What could make the systems more fun?
As one of the Arx coders, that's what I skim the thread looking for.
@meg said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
How about that prestige, eh?
There's a public Github project board for the planned prestige rework, which details the plan that we put together.
@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
I'd be super interested in how staff envisions AP sharing/transfer/selling to come back to the game.
The current thought is that it might work better with a differentiation between "your own AP" and "assisted AP", as separate pools. Then a lot of things would require using your own AP, so when you're out, you can't get someone to assist you for that thing, even if they could assist you for other things.
Contractors who semi-ghost on the project they were hired for, and then abruptly drop a "so I have to leave the area for a prolonged time and have to quit, sorry" note to you with no warning.
The person in question seemed nice enough, but I'm still kind of cheesed over the situation.
