@Thenomain Realistically, there's no catering to every preference or personal distaste. At a certain point, it's either 'accept the terms, or don't ride the ride'.
Age limits (18+ only players) are a barrier to entry.
'Must be able to communicate in English' is the case for most MUXes, is a far more significant hurdle, and that is also a barrier to entry.
I really do not believe this is a case of capability; it's a case of preference 99.999999999999999999999999% of the time.
@Coin In all seriousness, I wouldn't care if somebody made surreality-is-a-bitch@gmail.com to register with, I just need something to send them their damn passwords.
...now I kinda wanna see if that's available, but no.
@Coin With most of the crafting stuff, it tends to become a factor of 'got it done faster than a non-professional' more than anything else, with the various PT bonuses, since people generally have enough dice to make something unless it's pretty extreme. Which is a fairly realistic representation of 'how a professional does it' vs. an amateur. There's hobbyist clique, too, for that, for non-professional groups to essentially manage the same.
@Coin They're stupid useful for crafting especially, and other extended rolls.
I know it's relevant for my purposes.
Create at login is not going to be enabled.
Guests will not be enabled at all times.
Wiki is required.
I am not allowing anonymous users account creation access on the wiki, and I do not trust the extensions that handle this in an automated fashion; further, they would not provide means to send the player their initial MUX password.
I'm going to need an email, because people will need to email to request a login for the MUX and wiki, and that's really just all there is to it. Ultimately, I am not going to cater to what I consider an unreasonable degree of paranoia about what is undoubtedly going to be, or quite easily can be, a throwaway gmail address.
If someone genuinely can't be bothered to create a throwaway email address if they're that concerned about being identified by one of two headstaff who can see their IP address anyway, I can't really say I have much sympathy, and can't imagine how, if this is somehow beyond their ken, they would ever make it through chargen on any MUX, anywhere, pretty much ever. Even CG on Shang is more complex than creating a throwaway webmail addy somewhere.
@HelloProject In fairness, LinkedIn will not ever stop emailing you ever no matter what once they have your email. I am pretty sure someone could carpet bomb every one of their server farms and corporate locations and they would still never stop sending email constantly, nagging the shit out of you that don't you know Bob, that guy you met that one time when you were 12 who just can't resist the urge to connect with you? WE KNOW YOU KNOW BOB, YOU UNRESPONSIVE, UNPROFESSIONAL WRETCH!!! Ahem. I might just hate LinkedIn, and want to set everyone who ever farmed their address book to try to get me to sign up and add me to it. Anybody who hands out a list to LinkedIn like this should be thrown into sludge pit full of electric eels and have their corpse displayed publicly as a warning to others.
I am really not kidding. I sincerely mean that. That company is a plague. I've seen MLM schemes less tenacious.
What makes me shake my head about this is that so many places get email addresses in a manner much less secure than what I'm suggesting every day via wiki login requests, which reveal that information potentially to the entire staffcorps of a game, since these jobs tend to go to an all-staff-viewable bucket, rather than one game gmail account maintainer, with a designated alternate headstaffer who also has access in case the other vanishes or has to be away for whatever reason.
We do not have widespread problems from this information being shared to potential entire staffcorps the way it's regularly shared now. This is, I think, a much more significant indicator of how people handle this information when it's available. (Read: with a very low incidence of troubles stemming from it.)
Hell, what I'm recommending shares it with fewer folk than it currently is normally on any game with manual account creation and a staff corps of more than 2, so the flinch factor seems disproportionate to reality to me. Sure, it's a fairly occluded reality, but it's still the reality of things.
In the end, if people aren't cool with it, they won't sign up for a game that asks for it, and life will absolutely go on.
@Lithium Yeah, I think for heavy-duty PvP games it could arguably be an issue. I just have less than zero interest in running one of those.
@Thenomain Was just the mention of the target numbers being eliminated. I don't think that was necessarily a helpful step in the realism department. It was definitely easier to figure than memorizing countless +/- modifiers.
...of course, it still had those anyway, so. 
@Thenomain I'm not a fan of some of the auto-approve registration options for wiki, so at some point, since the wiki is required for access to the game... I'm going to need an email.
It is just easier to have people email to request a login, and get the login on game and wiki in one go, and since I need an email anyway, that's the ID to link alts/track whatever as needed per player.
Some stuff is opt-in, yes. Any and all fluff -- freeze alerts, 'this other game would like to use the creature you created, how do you want us to put them in touch with you/you can just tell us to hand it along/etc.' credit/usage requests, etc. These things are all intended as staff-to-player courtesies available exclusively by request of the player, intended to respect their work and contributions and avoid easily avoidable and needless hassles.
Sending somebody their reset password if needed wouldn't be, though. The reason for this is pretty simple... they can't get on the game to ask for it. I mean, I suppose this could be set up somehow on the cron to newpass them again at the end of the temp-ban to something you tell them in the initial temp ban warning/email, but the odds of somebody remembering that, and the hassle involved in setting that up, are a code nightmare. I've asked for code assist on things like this over the years and it's cricketsville, for the most part.
To many people share IPs with roommates/spouses/siblings/family for me to be comfortable banning (even temporarily) by IP these days, as this punishes more than just the offender. @newpass and restrictions on account creation are it, for me. While there's an argument to be made that this is incentive for people in those environments to behave themselves more because more people's fun than just their own is riding on them not doing ban-worthy crap, I'm not keen on the idea of it: if somebody's getting banned for being a dick to (reasonably) innocent parties, being a dick to other innocent parties is not a viable solution to me. A VPN will get someone around an IP block easily anyway, as will a jaunt to the nearest net cafe or wifi-enabled lounge somewhere.
@Thenomain Is a tangent, nothing more.
@Thenomain See, I love me some target numbers -- but not necessarily in the structure for WoD.
For MUX, I think target numbers can simplify things somewhat; modifiers handle this now, but that's a lot of +/- to keep in mind at all times and their application is dodgy at best in terms of uniformity from scene to scene, ST to ST, etc.
I wouldn't suggest re-introducing them to WoD, but as it stands, that it's as difficult to perform a casual task as it is a very hard one with the same pool is the kind of simplification that breaks reasonableness more than it can be said to enhance it in any way. It's simpler, yes, but that isn't always a selling point.
@Ghost said in Identifying Major Issues:
There may be some useful contact/notification purposes for having emails, but the stance I sense from most players is I will decide when MU is important, and I don't want MU chasing me down when I'm not choosing to log in.
That would be why...
@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:
allow people to OPT-IN to get a notification if one of their characters is going to freeze soon
...is always relevant.
@Ghost I'm not calling you any names or slinging insults at you; I am discussing your argument exclusively. Knock off the accusations, please.
There's also a bit of licensing and business transition history involved, not just 'cleaning up mistakes'.
Considering that they heavily revised, and re-released (and re-re-released in every edition for mortal and supernaturals, an expansion from the original Hunter-only approach that TR and FC spread more broadly) PT, I can't say I agree, but that's neither here nor there.
WW/OP doesn't focus on game balance, or trouble themselves much about 'the balance between mortals and supernaturals'. What you're describing increases the imbalance between the two and in a way not indicated in the game's current design by attempting to define the intent behind the mechanic as something other than what it is, which has been reinforced in subsequent editions of the various game lines.
If that's what you think is desirable, this does that. If not, you're not increasing balance, you're highlighting imbalance. Either way, cool, but the difference is relevant.
@Ghost said in CofD and Professional Training:
Having said that, if you feel strongly that the existence of the mechanic itself is proof positive that it's appropriate and not overpowered, you're welcome to your opinion on the matter. Clearly, I have a different viewpoint, and that's okay.
If that determination -- not appropriate and overpowered -- is predicated on the notion that 9-again/8-again/rote are intended to define non-mundane/supernatural powers only, that's just factually inaccurate. It's not a matter of opinion.
Love it or hate it, think it should be or shouldn't be, is a different animal; it's no skin off anybody's nose.
Making a design intent/purity argument based on something the actual design directly and frequently contradicts, however, is just a bad argument to use for the preference. If running a game, sure, run with that, because it's pure personal preference and interpretation there. Don't try to sell that interpretation to all and sundry as the intent of the game designers, however, when the facts simply don't support that interpretation.
@Ghost Hyperbole and a real contortionist stretch of logic aren't fact.
And it changes absolutely nothing about the fact that the mechanic is in no way singled out or defined as being indicative of a measure of superhuman or non-mundane ability.
That they wrote it all into a power designed to indicate precisely (edit: those things professionally trained mundane skill), without a supernatural predicate, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that your preferred interpretation is absolutely nothing more than that and has nothing to do with the intent of the game designers.
You can argue for your perspective, but stop pretending it's some purist approach that's 'the true source of the mechanic', because on its face, that's utter nonsense.
@Derp @HelloProject That.
Plus, having it means you can do some cool things -- like allow people to OPT-IN to get a notification if one of their characters is going to freeze soon, or to send a new password over to the player at the end of a temp-ban, send a new password if they forgot theirs and need to verify they are who they say they are somehow, etc. (@newpassword is the easiest way to do this when it becomes necessary, and it requires somewhere to send that.)
I didn't plan to have guest logins enabled at all times. Mostly, they wouldn't have been, but there would have been a posted schedule for 'open house' periods for guest availability on the wiki. So email becomes a little more necessary. (I hadn't decided if it'd be something like a certain week per month, weekends only, one month per season, or what. But it was a thing.)
@ThatGuyThere I have generally planned to require email if I ever open something -- as in, email to request a first login.
But really, that's required anyway for how I'm doing stuff; wiki use is also necessary, and wiki, while it can be set up to not require an email to be handed off to someone directly for account creation with some hacks or a complete lack of security, needs it.
Really, we hand out our emails on most games that create wiki logins this way, and generally to more than the 1-2 people who may have access to a game's gmail account to +jobs, which are often set up in such a way that any staffer might be able to read the email that's been shared in the +request.
Instead of thinking of things from the perspective of 'how games that require you to email for game access', which are few (and have the glaring problem of Elsa attached to them), think of it from the perspective of how many times people already do share this information in a much more broad way in +request on a game without anything remotely resembling an incident arising from it.
@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:
@deadculture I don't even know what's happening here.
Apparently I'm evil, I guess for pointing that 'the Firan players who ruined SC' were 1) mostly just normal players, the same as you find anywhere (I know for a fact many of them played WoD too) and 2) that the game had strengths aside from its weaknesses?
@surreality You're acting like the people you whine about harassing you everywhere. You really seem like a mental health case, and that this hobby is something you shouldn't be involved in.
(So let's just quote this before it all gets edited yet again.)
You're not evil for that claim. You're an idiot for being so dedicated to bashing @HelloProject that you didn't bother to read what he actually wrote, and it's just a bonus irony that it agreed with that sentiment in full.
I'm a petty, vindictive cunt when people earn it, and that is precisely what's happening right now -- I cheerfully own that shit. Call it my inner Sicilian waking up.
If you consider reading a thread and laughing at your fuckup when it was spotted harassment, what would you call what you did in mine? Oh, yeah... huh. Double standards and behavior blindness are typical of the toxic crap described.
And more of the same: divert from admitting and owning a fuckup or employing even the most marginal measure of self-awareness by increasingly escalating accusations and ad hominem absurdity. You win the internets! (Shame the prize is a dunce cap.)
Edit: P.S. Back to ignore now. 
@bored Nah, I just saw the comment and decided to take a look, because it seemed destined to be funny, and, you know, more of the same shit I've seen from you before. But that was gold, man. Gold.
You can try to divert from your boneheaded bullshit like this, but it's not going to work; safe for posterity now.
Fun definition of toxic: so dedicated to being a negative fuckwit and maintaining a false sense of superiority that one loses the ability to read what's on the screen right in front of them and resorts to increasingly desperate ploys to divert attention from their own failures by slinging dirt at others.
@deadculture Sure thing.
@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:
@HelloProject said in Fading Suns 2017:
@bored I've been on 100+ games and I can assure you that this behavior is the minority, being decent and not a literal monster is not some unique special snowflake thing.
There's always at least one or two shitty players, but for most of a game being that way? Yeah, no.
So... 'most of the game' were 'literal monsters'? Yeah, OK. You're definitely not in crazy hyperbole territory, or anything. Please show us the way, sensei! Since apparently we're all fucking moron barbarians here while you're playing thousands of wonderful games with no problems?
^ I just find this fucking hilarious. Probably good to preserve it before it gets edited to hide the stupid.