Posts made by Thenomain

The reason I tapped out was because I was treating them there like they were us here. I don't see enough interactivity there to disrupt the ideas that they might have. Nascent communities don't need that.

One of my more vocal/angry/forceful posts apparently (I am inferring) caused a regular poster to quit, so I am no longer going to share my opinion on the Optional Realities boards.

This also means I'm not going to be reading the articles. It was one of the articles that I flipped my shit over, due to how poorly thought-out and limited it was. I imagine my response was the kind of response that causes people to not want to engage with.

I suspected that my assessment of the articles was going to remain on the 50/50 (solid 'C') range for what I would expect in content; the quality of writing was about what I'd expect for a fan 'zine so eh who cares about that. The good articles were good. It's up to you, the reader, to decide if it's worth finding content that interests you.

Best of luck, OR.

Things Other People Said:

@ThatGuyThere said:

Arkham Horror

Too long, too meandering. Eldritch Horror is the same game with all the good parts of all the games between then and now.

@Sunny said:

Lords of Waterdeep

I'll be honest on this one; it felt dull and bland and bland and dull. I didn't get anything out of it except knowing there was a good game in here. I just couldn't see it.

@Bobotron said:

Red Dragon Inn?

Good fun chaos. I prefer this game 100 times more than Munchkin because Munchkin never fucking ends.

@Hardwired said:

Chez-geek for slacking, or munchkin as it's an classic.

I think Chez Geek is what Munchkin should be. When I feel like playing the Big M, I demand on Chez Geek.

@SG said:

If you're doing 5+ players, try Illuminati. It's a fun Steve Jackson game that was recently reprinted and it's a hoot. It's recommended for 4-8 players.

Do you mean the original Illuminati where everyone draws from the same pool of cards, or the money-grab CCG Illuminati where you have to build your own deck? I far prefer the former, because you don't have to mess around with the game before playing it.

@Ganymede said:

To no one's surprise, perhaps, I enjoy Settlers of Catan, Acquire, and Diplomacy.

Settlers is a great gateway game (I'll agree with @Misadventure that the 5+ player version is more fun; Cities and Knights is the halcyon). Acquire is a game that I love to hate. Diplomacy I shall play some day, but my friends aren't that social.

@thebird said:

Forbidden Desert

It's a better version of Forbidden Island, and is quite playable with two.

Games in our group's regular rotation (that have not been mentioned yet):

• Eclipse: A version of Twilight Imperium that you can play faster than a fortnight. (Twilight Imperium being the Axis & Allies of sci-fi board games.)
• Alien Frontiers: An insanely good dice-as-peices board game.
• Dominion: I still think this is the best deck-building game. No two games ever the same. Can get old with just one boxed set, but any two (base + intrigue, for preference) and it gets exponential.
• Power Grid: I'm a little surprised this isn't on Ganymede's list, considering its age. One of the few games I've played where being the starting player is the worst position to be in. This works oh so beautifully.

@Pyrephox said:

Man. That list is pretty much a wish list of what I've wanted in a game for a while. Awesome!

... HEY!

I am going to be offended and indignant on @Coin's behalf, knowing that he would probably be glad that other people are doing these things, too.

@thebird said:

ETA: I love Pandemic.... but I hate it so much. Especially after we learned we'd been playing it wrong for a while?

How had you been playing it wrong?

@tragedyjones said:

@Thenomain said:

@Coin said:

It's fucking raining and I'm wearing my brand new leather sneakers. Fuck.

#firstworldproblem

He doesn't live in the first world!

Then he should stop pretending to be important by having first world problems.

@Coin said:

It's fucking raining and I'm wearing my brand new leather sneakers. Fuck.

#firstworldproblem

I assume this is Paradox Interactive and not Paradox Entertainment.

(internet check) Yup, it's PI :: https://twitter.com/ShamsJorjani/status/659711362185211904

Welcome, Hardwired. Good luck with Mu* Code. (Sometimes called softcode, Mushcode, Muxcode, or something along those lines.) At risk of pulling the demons out of the woodwork to whine, I consider it to be most comparable to PHP. Not in how you code it, but that it's a mish-mash of stuff that doesn't make sense but a lot of people use it because it's easy to pick up and get started Mush-Coding with.

I have no other horse in this race than keeping Eldritch drama-free, but I continue my belief that open is better than closed.

=============================== Announcements ================================
Message: 1/104                     Posted        Author
Siteban: Rostam                    Wed Oct 28    Thenomain
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After being asked to look into a player here by their connections to Reno and 
RtK, I have decided to remove Rostam from EldritchMUX.

The reasoning behind this concerns mainly his behavior as Rex on Reno, who was 
accused by several players of OOC emotional manipulation. After talking about 
this with Reno staff, I decided that this behavior was likely to repeat and 
asked Rostam to leave the game. He agreed.

I expect this to have some fallout off the game, if not on, so let me preface to 
say that while it was Deviant who asked me to look into this, the reason behind 
my decision was the history of drama and not any drama slap-fight that Dev and 
Rostam had on another game. They're grown men and can sulk in their rooms.

As Rostam was by his own admission involved in nothing, I don't forsee any 
issues on the game but if someone has questions or issues of any IC or OOC 
nature, please let me know. (Page or put in a Bug request. Yeah, really.)

Thanks everyone, and enjoy your day.
==============================================================================

So I read three articles and replied to each on Optional Realities.

In summary: One was enjoyable and conversation did spur from it. One was bland and eh. One baffled me to the point of frustration. My response to this last one edged on the unreasonable, but there's only so much BS I can take in my day.

I'll keep at it, but I said I'd read them on their own merits. I'm giving them a C- so far. I'm hoping I just hit a bad spell for them.

@Griatch

The articles are fine.

Optional Realities suffers the problem of not knowing what it wants. The main page gives the opinion that you go for the articles and talk about them, or talk about the games that OR advertises, but I don't see that happening.

I blame the articles in part because most of them are not written to entice dialogue, and partially because the conversation it does create goes nowhere; I've read and I've tried. I can think of a series of game design articles that encourages the former and gets the latter:

http://extra-credits.net/

There's your game design blog. Now, it's video game design, but they have a few things going for them that OR does not:

1. They're professionals. This alone may give them the time and opportunities to be more passionate about their chosen field, but without engagement I don't think any community is going to thrive.
2. They include all forms of online gaming. They know MMOs came from Muds so don't rule Muds out. They don't rule anything out.

They don't have one thing that OR and Soapbox does:

1. By Mudders, For Mudders.

This is no personal vendetta against OR or anyone on OR. I've wished OR was more inclusive since day one, but instead I'm trying to review them on their own merits and by their own goals. I will try to write a second review based only on the articles, but it will have to wait some time.

So maybe what you all read was a copy of "Playground Antics of the Covenants" that accidentally got mixed in with "Wildly Fluctuating Power Balance of the Covenants".

The secrets of the Covenants are: We are going to power creep the shit out of this game line.

Hey! You got your Evennia Conversation in my Optional Realities!

@WTFE said:

There was absolutely zero engagement

Over-extended analogies aside (first ducks and now tea), the non-staff of OR made the biggest case for me to try it out. I was excited to see what the Evennia Folk were energetic about, and there is a little of that over on the OR communities as well.

I do have to remember that I can be hyper, that I like my interaction to be immediate. When I'm involved in other projects, though, the last thing I want is someone yapping in my ear for my attention. For that, I respect the Evennia folk not jumping immediately because they have in a very short time shown that they are willing to engage.

Sales.

So I decided to test the product. I suppose @Jaunt had a point that I was doing a lot of nay-saying about a product I knew nothing about. It's not a very good point; advertising, not shaming, is supposed to get you to want to try it. But it was a point. I think I've been fairly clear that it was a tangentially related group whose word-of-mouth drew my attention, but grass-roots campaigns are effective.

If I were to talk with zero-percent negativity, to give Optional Realities only constructive criticism, is that I think they're overextended, that they hope for the community and want to build that community through common dialogue spurred through their articles.

I think these articles are part of the problem. They are a product, and one I don't feel most of the authors are passionate about. They come off as separate from the community boards, and a community centers around interactivity and involvement. If the administration isn't showing interest toward the community, they can't expect anyone else to fill in the gap. It has happened, but they have to be damned lucky to find people with that passion.

I'm going to continue reading and posting there from time to time, because you all know that I do like to talk, and many of you know that I do like to learn the way similar people see the world differently.

So it's been a few weeks since I finally got myself signed up to the OR community site, and I've started some posts, and I've caused a little ruffle, and I've made some decent points, and here's my review:

Having a discussion on Optional Realities is like having a discussion with a young dog. There is a lot of silence coupled with what feels like tilting one's head and looking confused. I'm choosing to believe this as adorable.

The board has this 1-to-5 star rating system that is horribly outdated by modern social discussion standards. It's anonymous, as well, reducing it to counting the stains on a hotel mattress for all the good it does. It was explained to me that this system was to make sure that good posts were rewarded and "shit posters" are tagged. In practice, it's just as useful as WORA's old voting system.

The Optional Realities administration says they will discuss my suggestion to just go with a modern up-/down-vote system, or even just up-vote as positive reenforcement. Again, I get the sense that I might as well be throwing my suggestion into a slot over a suspiciously cylindrical container, one that is likely to be picked up and disposed of once per week.

It doesn't feel cozy, like some small communities can be. Its strongest personalities seem to be those we already know here: @Volund and @Griatch, as well as someone named "Unironicshitposter", which I find ironic since I don't see him shit-posting. Maybe I've just missed that phase.

I can't fault a new community for being new, but I can't find its soul nor its culture.

Second request for // and /* ... */ to be hilited as comments.

First request for #-1 to be hilited as a single unit, tho Mux does (very rarely) use #-2, too. %va-%vz as a single unit seems to be missing, too.

Also a request that if there was a place for me to add my own user-defined functions, tell us where that is. If there isn't ... whhhhhyyyyyy?!

@mouse said:

So mostly just old men

Ouch.

Wouldn't be mad at Denver being a bit more I don't know....nailbiting?

What does this mean?

@Royal said:

Friends.

Just think of all the social RP and a one room grid! Minimalist with a sweet soundtrack.

Seamus tried that with Victorian Reverie.

It sucked.