@Arkandel Well, there's underpowered at starting stats, and then there's underpowered at XP totals through the roof. Mage is completely sane and doesn't disrupt much if anything at starting levels, either, but get to 500xp in nWoD, and, wellllllllll...
So it's probably the same sort of issue.
I have no suggestions since I don't play anywhere presently, and I don't honestly plan to do anything more RPwise than maintain my 'talk to a buddy while he's deployed' OOC Shang login.
If you are around generally, though, I may want to pick your brain on some things down the line. The magic 8 ball has not given me a clear answer on whether or not this will be necessary, but when it gets back to me, I'll poke.
I will, probably, pull this up to continue private tinkering at some point.
I agree with @Three-Eyed-Crow's point, re: 'timing'. I figured that being clear I was asking specific questions and intent on focusing only on those specific questions would be clear enough in the constructive section of the forum, because a silly writeup that is deliberately campy is not what I consider any sort of real preview or pitch. I figured that was clear; that it was clear to most folks is honestly good enough.
I am not and have never been interested in crowdsourcing a game on a forum. As it says in the first post, I have no interest in the cavalcade of gloom-and-doom predictions that people flail over with wild hyperbole, or the laundry list of "it's gotta have"s that people pile on any time there's even a suggestion of a new game potentially existing. I am not Santa Claus, and I have zero interest in that job.
@bored can sling all the shit and make all the accusations (s)he likes; (s)he's on ignore and will stay there. The last laundry list wasn't even worth responding to as it is, and the folks who have pointed out that it was not a good idea to respond to the hand-wringing about worst case scenarios were right, and it pulled things further off course. @Ganymede's quote from else-thread puts a great deal into perspective on this front. And, no, I still don't think (s)he was deliberately being an asshat here in order to promote another game.
If there's something similar to the questions above, I'll just throw together a poll to aid in specificity, but that's still quite unlikely. It would clutter up the forum with polls, which strikes me as being super attention-whore-ish, and is exactly what I was trying to avoid doing with a catchall thread instead for specific and typically easy questions over a broad span of topics.
For the small handful of folks who did get an actual preview... those links won't work any longer. I'll be maintaining that domain name if I decide to stick with it, and when things are ready for review, it will work again. (And no, I'm not just going to stick it under my surreality.wtf random projects domain like I have done with other dev projects, no matter how appropriate that might actually be in this instance. Yes, I actually bought that for precisely that sort of thing, and as a place to house the generic droplet some day.)
Ultimately: things are pretty bleak right now, y'all. Not because of this -- the amount of work put in may be non-trivial but the project itself is fairly trivial -- but due to a lot of real world things going on that, well, whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses are, that about sums it up. If anything, this thread has proven there are definitely outlooks considerably more bleak and fatalistic than mine at the moment, so maybe things aren't quite so bad as they seem.
Re: This forum: This forum? Is fine. People who forget it isn't WORA, well, that's on them. Me included, when I let myself get sucked into it.
@Gingerlily It's dead, Jim. Provided you aren't doing game dev for something else, I don't mind, anyway.
@bored What was that about nobody getting up make up the rules in a thread? <head-scratches> I know somebody was going on about that somewhere...
@bored And oh so many things that weren't. 
I realize it's, you know, downright silly of me to ask that anybody respect my wishes about anything, but if you could take the discussion of your 7S game dev to a thread of its own, that'd show at least a minor smidgen of class. Thanks.
@Ghost I don't think he's doing things to promote his own thing. Keeping on with that isn't helping matters. 
Besides: more games is better. I hope his things works, just like I hope @Lisse24's game works.
I don't care if somebody doesn't like what I'm doing... so long as that's what I'm actually doing. When they're tilting at windmills and dragging me along as Sancho Ponza, however, well, welcome to the wonderful world of a complete waste of time.
@Ghost Dude did not give me a panic attack. @shangexile can whack off to actually having accomplished that, however, I guess.
@bored was just being Eeyore, throwing out one worst case scenario after another in ways that, unfortunately, do need to be addressed when they're brought up, unfortunately.
@Ganymede Honestly, no. This was mine. I considered handing it off to a friend before when I was having issues with someone else, but this one's mine. And it's too much mine for me to do that and not feel substantially more fucked up than I do. I had several hundred hours in on this thing, and it was still nowhere close to having its framework and documentation finished. This thing was 'all the stuff I have been hacking away at conceptually' for the better part of three years (edit: and the story world and game system I started working on when I was still in high school). It's very much mine.
@Ganymede said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):
@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):
I was already on my way out the door after the friend jacking me around six ways to Sunday for months, and I'd hoped to get the game theory stuff and whatnot done, up, and available before checking the fuck out to hopefully leave something useful behind, but really, I have no patience for the kind of bullshit going down with all the crazy assumptions and failures of reading comprehension.
I can't imagine why. I mean, it's not like you don't have a full life, hobbies, work, and a whole lot of other rewarding things in your life to spend time on.
That you even bothered to respond substantively is something of a curiosity.
We will likely always be here. At least, I'm pretty sure I will be. If your exit turns out to be a vacation, I'll hold the door open for your return.
Honestly... I can't play any more. Heart isn't there for it any more.
While I appreciate that, I don't think it's going to happen. Pretty much the last drop of my patience got expended lately dealing with some RL crap, the friend-in-hobby crap, some RL PTSD crap rearing it's ugly head, the troll managing to push some seriously ugly panic-attack-inspiring buttons without likely ever realizing it, and... frankly, I am just done. Beyond done.
I've probably been done for a while.
Being called out to magically defend against every wrong ever done to anyone in the hobby and justify the worst cliches of themes I'm not even using? Yeah, way so past fucking done, and this made that rather starkly clear to me.
...and I'm sorry, @cirim13. It is not my intent to let anybody down in this. It's something I'd wanted to do for a long time, but I am just... done.
@Ganymede The logo is up on imgur there if anyone wants it for anything; grab at will. The wiki and MUX have a backup, but they're already otherwise gone.
I was already on my way out the door after the friend jacking me around six ways to Sunday for months, and I'd hoped to get the game theory stuff and whatnot done, up, and available before checking the fuck out to hopefully leave something useful behind, but really, I have no patience for the kind of bullshit going down with all the crazy assumptions and failures of reading comprehension.
If anyone wants to read that as an inability to take criticism, please, have at -- criticize what @bored imagines it absolutely definitely was so totally going to be all you like, or, you know, how much of a cunt I am, I guess -- but I am seriously just done at this juncture.
@bored said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):
OK. I clicked through the one link you gave and skimmed a couple lines and there was something-something about rape (and his handle is shang related).
REAP, not rape. That is not a typo. Dude would create a character, play for like... two days, then +suicide the character only to repeat the process (endlessly) for like... years. So he got the nickname 'the serial REAPist, because he... kept reaping his characters over and over again. Like it even says in the damn post.
And quite frankly? Yes, you're annoying the shit out of me today because instead of actually getting to work on the game, I've had to spend a pile of time playing whack-a-mole addressing all of the worst case scenarios and fear-based assumptions
I haven't made you do anything, you're spending your time as you choose. If you think I'm just a troll, the proper response is to ignore me, which you've failed spectacularly at despite numerous opportunities. You've re-engaged once I've stopped at least twice (including very start of this whole thing). And if I'm 'forcing' you to address issues... sorry that the hobby has issues? I didn't create them, and I hate to break it to you but you'd have to address them at some point anyway.
No, because It's seriously hyperbole.
You quote me 4 times without finding even more than 3 actual complaints. My 'buckshot' approach boils down to: 1) I don't like aliens/Cthulhu.
And if you had said "I don't like aliens/Cthulhu' instead of 'it's always end of the world plots and Cthulhu (when the latter isn't even a thing)', not a peep. Nope, you went to assumption land.
- Cthlulu spawn are probably going to be most of the playerbase which takes it further away from the setting for me.
Which, again... the C word is not present. Further? Again, not what was said, and it's right there in the quote: suggestions of staff favoritism or that nobody would have any reason to bother with anything else.
- Don't split your population (which, again, is good advice and not a hostile criticism.) The funny thing is you've actually addressed all these issues pretty well, and if you left it to that, your thread wouldn't be such a tire fire.
And if people didn't begin with completely ignoring what I asked folks to focus on and didn't insist that a single bar that not every character on the grid would access would be an enormous problem, maybe we wouldn't be here.
This is not being defensive.
I'm sure.
No, I am annoyed as hell.
It is being annoyed as hell that instead of waiting a little while to see what the thing is and how much that sucks, you seem eager to begin a bashing based on what you assume it will be and the worst aspects of all of those things. This sticks me in the position of badly explaining shit on the fly that I've already had to budget 2-3 RL months toward getting down in a draft form that I think will be ready for a rough review, and that is a shitty position to be in.
There's a reason I asked folks to not go galavanting down those roads yet: they aren't even leveled, let alone paved, there are no maps or street signs, and the best answers anybody's going to get on those subjects are going to be about as useful as the directions you'd get mumbled out in broken English in a heavy accent by a drunken old coot at the gas station who uses the places where things didn't used to be as their landmarks. (Read: good luck getting anywhere with it.)
Bash it to bits based on what it actually is with wild abandon if you want to. Seriously. Sledge at will when the actual information is available.
Slinging shit around because of what you're afraid something might be is crap, though.
Re: all of this since you're basically saying the same thing a bunch of times:
Look. I get that it's unfinished, but you chose to show off your unfinished project.
I specifically and explicitly did not show off the project, and stated so clearly. If I was showing off the project, you'd have a link to the wiki. You do not.
I asked three questions based on a series of general criteria, the end. You have not been shown shit other than a logo image, you rampaging jackass.
Honestly? Fuck you, and fuck this.
The only actual front page art (other than a lot of gilded picture frames and an old map background image) is this, which is people-less. So that at least is safe!
...I hope? I suppose if someone had a very flowers and friendly lovey dovey family sort of workplace the skulls might be troublesome, but there's no nudity. Would not recommend browsing while running a daycare, however.
This is totally not on topic, but... it would probably surprise you how many people play on Shang from work.
Or maybe not.
But seriously, I would not want to be in that neighboring cubicle, you know?
Vintage street gang business cards.
...Countdown to 'Crazyboy-Rocker-Hitler' appearing on a MUX near you in 3... 2...
(I was more amused when I initially read Rocker as Rocket, but you can't have it all, I guess.)
@ThatGuyThere That is very helpful, actually -- thank you. That even specifically addresses the whole 'but it's paintings... ' thing. Thankfully, gallery sections and so on are tucked away in tabs, but it sounds like it's probably a good call to do a 'keep those in the hidden tab, too, plz' category.
@Arkandel Fair enough! Like I said, working from home, this is one of those things I have literally never had to deal with, so I have no idea what even the basic guidelines beyond 'no exposed genitals or super lewd poses' I see on other wikis.
@Arkandel That's kinda what I'm wondering -- does anybody think something like squid lady would be typical of NSFW? I mean there are technically technicolor boobs.
New question: The majority of reference imagery available for a variety of things -- a lot of it art -- includes painted bare breasts. While most are like the one in this thread, this is... not exactly porn.
I do not personally have any issue including imagery like the example of the squid lady from earlier in the thread in the main pages of the wiki.
I, however, work from home. I could put XXX material on there and not get yelled at, so I am not a fair judge of what might present an issue for others.
Usually, it's subtle, and it's obviously painted -- sometimes it's barely there. That may or may not make any difference to someone's employer, however, and they may not give a damn that it's an old Rackham fairy tale illustration or similar artwork (it may be the same as Hustler or Penthouse to any given boss).
This is especially an issue for this project because it's very interconnected with the wiki.
While I can photoshop some of this, that, too, is work I need to know if I should be budgeting hours for. Concerns? Comments? Do you have any guidelines or examples from your workplace that could be shared?