Posts made by Sunny

@kay

Love. So much love. I miss ambiance emits being a thing SO much.

@bobgoblin

Please stop trolling in game development. I'm not a mod or anything, but I think folks would generally prefer that threads not get taken over by that sort of thing in this forum section.

I love the idea of the scenes code.

I think it should be implemented alongside a real grid, not instead of.

I am one of those players that needs an actual 'physical' grid for a variety of reasons that I have tried to explain until I am blue in the face, and I will not go into them again (as I'm uninterested in further thinly veiled insults directed towards my person in the form of 'anybody who likes this is stupid' that inevitably result).

But yes, people like me do exist, and while I am sure I would (and have) try games that use a new way of doing it, I inevitably wander away because I cannot find RP with the tools provided to me. It's not how my brain works. The virtual-physicalness of it matters to me.

@aria I'm sorry, that's rough.

I too would check this out.

Here's a wayback snapshot of Electric Soup -- you can get a sort of idea as to what I am talking about by looking at this. It's not exactly what I'm talking about, as I think that a vital component of the success was the partnership with Gateway/OGR, but:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080321194939/http://www.electricsoup.net:80/?q=taxonomy/term/18

https://web.archive.org/web/20071217183843/http://electricsoup.net/ES/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=18&Itemid=29

https://web.archive.org/web/20080321194041/http://electricsoup.net:80/ES/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=5&Itemid=29

I think there's a pretty significant difference between social sites / sites set to support a particular codebase, and actual whole-community hubs. Beyond that, ACTIVE is important, SUPPORTED is important, and OUTREACH is important. All of these things need to be happening/need to happen regularly, content needs to be getting created, etc. There has to be a significant community buy in hobby wide. OGR was a ridiculous amount of work for the time I was involved as staff there; when Siobhan retired, nobody really realized just how MUCH work was involved. It is not for the faint of heart.

ETA: Honestly. It was as much work if not more than Ashes was, because it was a TON more moderation required than an RP game ever thought of needing. our hobby is kind of snarky, and it takes something special to keep people from going there and yet still coming back

ETA2: A site devoted to the support of a particular codebase is not a community hub. A social site is not a community hub. These are apples and oranges. Yes, it's all fruit, but that's where the comparison ends. I am not talking about a social site, nor am I talking about a site to support a particular codebase. I said community hub, and I meant community hub.

@roz

They were community hub places. IGU was a forum like this one, but moderated heavily and kept focused on positive things. Idealistic Gamers Unite. STC was Storyteller's Circle, and OGR was Online Gaming Resource, which was created because STC started allowing nasty/negative crap and was focused primarily on WoD. OGR also had Electric Soup attached to or associated with it for a while, which was a website that had the articles / talks / forums. Again, heavily moderated and curated. Both OGR and STC had embassies and code support for OTT games.

Doubleposting because this doesn't belong in an edit:

1. Community Resource
   We need something like OGR, IGU, or STC. These things are a LOT of work. They need to be community focused, kept positive, and they need to be active. Hosting classes, discussions, and talks, having somewhere to post actual articles and resources all collected together. Moderated heavily. The embassies and advertising and so on is vital because that gives game runners incentive to actually participate in these places. Links to the different clients, how to get support for them (if you can), etc.

1 is required because of step 2:

2. Publicize community resource. Do community outreach. Go to places like WoW's RP forums, the tumbler RP communities, whatever. Put up ads for the hobby as a whole, with introductions and explanations and so on. Be ready to be flamed, and be ready to answer questions. A LOT of questions. Make sure that the community resource is READY for the influx of people that come from this, with introductory OTT sessions or something

These two steps are what is required to start down this road of bringing new folks into the hobby. There might be other ways to go about it, but this would have the highest success rate with the largest chance of actual retention. I used to participate very heavily in OGR. It was a LOT of work.

ETA: MSB does not and will never qualify as #1. It has a higher chance of turning people away from the hobby than bringing them in.

I feel like it's unfair to ask how we can make the hobby more appealing to new people / how we can bring new people in, and note that we're not talking about X, Y, or Z -- when X, Y, and Z are the biggest issues surrounding bringing new folks in. I don't see how a constructive discussion that could actually accomplish anything is possible without breaking into things that are specifically noted as outside of the scope of conversation. Like, the issues are systemic, technical, and cultural. Addressing anything else is like putting a new coat of paint on a rustbucket. Great, the paint is pretty, but...

Direct personal invite for two, the other was a Facebook group I'm part of. Usually it is 'hey I want to rp find us a game...' and then whoever it is comes back with something. Mostly I don't add thread. I will look at an ad AFTER I am thinking about a game to judge whether or not I want to check it out based on how the staff conducted themselves.

I am going to play vampire again, I think. I am looking forward to this a lot. The more I talk about it / read about it, the more excited I am. I am probably just now on the other side of the line between many years of burnout and nostalgia, but...yeah. Really looking forward to this.

@lithium said in What Is Missing For You?:

@sunny Tenebrae also suffers from an extreme lack of anything going on on the grid at all, as people idle around waiting for people to run 'adventures'.

I am not fond of the policy decision and the impact it has on things, but that's from a perspective of what I like and enjoy. It is actually working as intended for the staff there, from what I can tell. They are running a D&D game, and have a solid idea of what that looks like, and have received the result that they want. I don't disagree with you, though.

@roz Yeah, the only games I can think of that do what he/she is speaking of are like, a couple of Harry Potter games because of their source material and genuinely wanting to stay on the level of the books/movies. I mean, I think there was a Disney game for a while that tried very hard to enforce people being G rated (and then closed abruptly iirc when they finally realized it was not going to happen), and the occasional outlier will TRY it...

Wait! Tenebrae has no-private-rp rules! That is a modern game that persists even though they do have rules along these lines. So it is done, I just maintain that it's rare.

ETA: @Carex -- have you looked into Kushiel games at all?

@arkandel Sure, and I don't mind that you did create a thread for said conversation! I don't find it inappropriate to say that the premise itself is flawed though, and feel that instead it is vital that this get included in any discussion of the topic.

ETA: I don't know the situation you're referring to, so I can't speak to it. I certainly cannot divine the motivations of the people participating in her plot, nor do I know if any of them told her directly 'I don't like the type of plot you're running, so I'm going to make it about politics' or anything along those lines, or if it was a miscommunication/misunderstanding/something else going on. Which is my point. Especially now, NONE of us can claim to be able to divine their motivations.

Unless you're going on the record saying that you do this and X and Y are why, or someone ELSE is going to do so, all we are doing is sight-unseen attributing vaguely malicious motivations to strangers.

I find the premise itself flawed, and think that it can be attributed to gossip and assumptions, rather than an actual issue on these games. I think that putting the topic in game development lends legitimacy to the people who gossip like this, and think that it's contributing to a significant cultural problem that we are already working against.

I have commented emphatically that I was on my way out; given this discussion and the changes I have observed, even though there really isn't a final answer laying around or anything...I am happy with the direction things are going, and I'm going to stick it out. Thanks for the hope that things can (and are going to) get better.

Buffy.

@pandora

I can COMPLETELY understand this perspective. On board with much of your peeve about it, even!

@bobotron

I just noticed the list of developers. OMG. Pre-order is Saturday? Yeah. I too will be purchasing it.