@Insomnia said:
Witcher 3 is on sale now on Greenman Gaming for 50% off. If you have been waiting for it to be on sale, now's the time!
(They have a lot of Rockstar stuff on Sale right now too.)
On a scale of 1-10, how much more playable is it over Witcher 1? Both in system and overall game/story.
@WTFE said:
@Jaunt said:
Other than that, WTFE has the right of it: I'm here to counter-troll trolls, until it's not worth it to me anymore.
I think you mean @Thenomain here.
*sip*
@Misadventure, he's playing the Wora drinking game, taking a sip every time Jaunt posts for his own amusement.
Thank you for picking up on that. I didn't have time to do the research at lunch. I don't think the family tree of code bases is important in this case, but the distraction of history is interesting.
Incidentally, PernMush was the code test base of TinyMush 2, tho it is the game that Shadow came from. The game developers and Amberyl & Ambar inspired him to try his own hand at it, tho I believe Penn was mostly Amberyl's project after the start of it. It's been a few decades.
Likewise, thank you for your own attempt at making the points I've been trying to make since about page one. It's refreshing when you can find concordance in a sea of vitriol.
@Arkandel said:
@BetterJudgment True! Unlike the rest of what we do and talk about here which is guaranteed to pass the test of time with flying colors.
This community has been around for, what, 10 years? The earliest Mush in, I believe, 1998. Pretty sure time has been tested.
@crayon said:
Discussion of all online text-based role-playing games is something that we encourage on our site, and all games are up for discussion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a narrower focus group in mind.
You're making it hard to reply to you at face value, you know. There is a certain point where responding to this fact, right here, is frustrating to the point of wanting to find Jeshin and get drunk with him so we can hash this shit out.
I have told both you and where this fails, because it does fail, and it fails right here:
(edit: this is the board being stupid again. quoting in a different manner)
] @Thenomain said:
]
]] You are not entitled to define the hobby without input from all parts of the hobby, even if you disagree with them.
]
] Whoever said we were trying to define the hobby?
You did. It's on your first page. I typed out the whole thing. Jeshin gets it. If his life wasn't being ... well, life right now, I'd be in the middle of a chat with him because what you and @Jaunt are doing is ... well, it's no better than what you are saying is being done. As much as @WTFE can get on my nerves, he is right. You both need to stop trying to defend yourselves, especially to people you look down upon, and maybe just take a step back and let hot tempers settle. It's conceited and just ... nngh!
I appreciate that you at least are trying to hold a conversation, but I honestly don't think you get it, and you're doing the same thing that people everywhere do when they don't understand: Bully through it anyhow. And since this atmosphere is pretty hostile to you guys right now, this is making you come off as, well, hostile as well.
This is why I respect Jeshin. I know how he feels about here, yet he is giving an honest, straight-forward try. He's not playing games here, and he's not saying nice things through clenched teeth, and that has to be hard.
You and @Jaunt have made some very good points, but like some of the good points made by people who aren't OR representatives, they have been couched in some pretty negative connotations. This makes it very easy to dismiss the points, and that gets both you and I ...
... Nowhere.
I'm going to hold you as accountable for getting nowhere as I, @crayon. Am I right? I try to be. Do I need to be agreed with? Absolutely not, but I will try to change how I think, and what I do, until there is a bridge between our communities.
Bridging the various text-based RPG communities is in your charter.
This is quite different than "our place is our place and we'll talk but we really want xxxx". A lot of the discussion here—those parts that are discussion—have been about this exactly.
I'm responding to you directly because you responded to me directly, because by responding to me I assume that you want to talk to me, so all of this "we don't want to talk about it" does kind of come off as confusing at best, but through the lens of both some people on Soapbox being downright vitrolic and you responding, understandably, defensively, then this "confusing" becomes downright bang-head-against-the-wall frustrating.
My advice? Pick your position and present it. Not officially like you and @Jeshin have been, but in the way a growing community would, like people talking about this great idea they have called Optional Realities.
And for chrissakes, don't be offended when we disagree. This board is more than a discussion board, we are all creators. Everyone who has posted in this thread has written for a game, or coded for one, or created a major event. We are not strangers to this world, nor to your world.
Jeshin gets it. I don't think he knows what to do with it, but he gets it, and I'd be happy to talk to him at length about this. He knows, but I think both he and I forgot that for a bit.
Note: I will ignore @Jaunt's reply to this post, if he/she has one. I'm just not interested in his thoughts anymore, and that's all there is to it.
Edit for second note: @crayon, if you want to discuss this somewhere away from this board and its negative connotations and negative everythings, give me a heads up and I'll give explaining this a different kind of try, assuming that both your and my hard feelings are left at the door and people who love their chosen hobby is appreciated. If I'm reading you right, this is a goal anyhow.
Yes, I'm aware at the contradiction here.
No, I won't be insulted if the response is "no way in hell".
Oh absolutely. This is almost certainly why the administration here has not closed the thread. I'm not sure what @Glitch or @EmmahSue think about it, mind, but since of the three I'm the one who wanted to try and keep the vitriol out of conversations and was told to back down, then I'm guessing it's all good.
@Sunny said:
I think a huge part of my problem with these guys here is that they're taking advantage of this place in a not-good way.
I don't know how they could. The rules of this place are scarce to nonexistent. The worst they have done is be smug and slightly two-faced ("engage us! ... no, in not that way" and "we are about all games! ... no, not those").
It does sound like they're going toward one of the (strongly worded) suggestions I gave earlier in this thread: Either be open and build bridges, or own up to being closed and do whatever you want. Nothing's wrong with either, but trying to be both (c.f., OR's own mission statement on their homepage) is disingenuous.
@Jaunt said in Optional Realities & Project Redshift:
I'm still willing to respond civilly to civil conversation.
According to the 10 or so people I talk to, you are not.
You don't get to decide what is civil all by yourself. This is why it's called "civil".
@Sunny said:
Do you love me yet, @Thenomain? Do you????????
As the only person really replying to anything at the time, I was trying to let the thread just be a series of un-commented posts since there seemed to be nothing left to talk about, so I kind of blame you for all this. "Blame" in the same way that the one person who says "at least it can't get worse" is to blame for the sudden shit-storm that follows.
It really feels like someone decided that something needed done, without any consideration that things were done. This is often the case when someone sees a log of past events and, to them, they are all hot and new and fiery passion takes over, instead of calm sense.
In a small scenario in my head, Jeshin on some OR staff communications board says, "I am so tired of those Soapbox guys and ..." and the knee-jerk white-hat that we Mu*ers can get in our heads took over. "Let me do this for my friend!" Which is cool and noble and all, but has begun so many feuds that never should have been.
I'm probably wrong, but it's one of the few scenarios where I can understand what the hell just happened.
I didn't understand it until now, no.
Dude, he's trolling now. Posting for his own amusement. Take a sip.
To be honest, @WTFE, I thought that he said that he wasn't officially representing OR here, so I'm not sure how to take his telling you that "they" will continue posting advertisements here. A lot of what he (or she, for all I know) is saying is inconsistent. I did try to be honest and take the "I want a serious discussion" seriously, but I suspect I'll be accused of the opposite for ... reasons?
I dunno, man. I just do not know.
@Sunny said:
@Jaunt said:
I doubt that it scores you as many points with @Thenomain as you hope it will, either.
DAMNIT. @Thenomain, why won't you love me?
What? When did anyone say this? Is the implication here that I'm some big chief dog and you guys are my sycophants?
What?
I ...
What?
...
...
...
What?
@Jaunt said:
@Thenomain said:
but that lack of self-awareness is a huge reason why I don't want OR to be successful. (Sorry, @Jeshin. I am very, very sorry to say that about what should be an awesome, inclusive project.)
Your attempts at emotional manipulation aren't as refined as you think they are.
I'm not trying to appeal to anyone's emotion, so you're right, they're not as refined as you think that I think they are.
Ah well, I tried.
@Jaunt said:
Our community is a specific genre of MUD that is over 20 years old. If the style of MUSH played by "most" people on this board is not represented on OR, then those people don't really need to worry about OR. It's that simple.
I was hoping this would come up.
Last I checked (two weeks back), OR represents itself as a site for discussion of all online text-based role-playing games.
All.
Not some.
Not even only those that fall inside the Three Rules of Jeshin's Best-Game Ideology.
All. Even Choose-Your-Own-Adventures.
OR spotlights those games with three different criteria. I think these criteria are bad ideas, but because of a lot of things it became clearer on the OR site the difference between the two.
This is an Advertisement Thread. It's not a "re-brand and design Optional Realities" thread. I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand.
This is Soapbox, a discussion forum, where discussion will happen. Engaging with that discussion makes you part of it. If you don't want to be part of that discussion, stop engaging. If you want the board admin to cut off discussion here, ask. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand, either.
I have no idea why both you and @crayon seem to have little sense of self-awareness, but that lack of self-awareness is a huge reason why I don't want OR to be successful. (Sorry, @Jeshin. I am very, very sorry to say that about what should be an awesome, inclusive project.)
@Jaunt said:
I'm not here in any sort of official capacity.
If you are OR staff, then you are here in official capacity. This is a concept that Mu* owners do not seem to understand, and yet it's never been not true. If you are talking about the thing you are in charge of, then you are being official. It works this way in the real world as well.
If you are not OR staff, then that's a different matter. I was under the impression that discussion with you was important to the formation of OR's policies and direction. This correction would make discussion much easier.
If you truly believed that the problem lay in miscommunication of ideas, then you wouldn't write offensive remarks on the thread in regards to Jeshin and Crayon and OR ... not unless your purpose was to offend, or inspire others to offend.
This is ... I don't know how you come to this conclusion, but it's presumptive. Quit it.
It's because I recognize the tactics that you've used throughout this thread.
Doubt it.
@Thenomain said:
You, yourself, are introducing ideas not mentioned earlier in this thread meaning that of three OR representatives, no two of them have given the same viewpoint of what OR is about.
You almost brought up a point labored many times earlier in the thread that I am happy to respond to, at least in part.
This is cherry-picking, by the way.
Please note from my earlier comment that I'm not against cherry-picking, just bad cherry-picking.
"I'm more stubborn, you go first."
"No, I'm more stubborn, you go first!"
As long as the record shows that I was the first one in this statement. 
- Do you feel as though this community has acted abusively towards OR, Jeshin and Crayon? If so, do you feel as though you had a personal hand in that, whether purposefully or unpurposefully?
Oh yes. Absolutely. However, every individual in this thread is their own person. I don't distrust OR because of your behavior; the idea of a community being a thing whole cloth falls apart at a certain level. We used to call it the "Wora Hive-Mind Fallacy," because many people quite happily said how evil Wora was because Wora is evil. Nevermind that a lot of the changes you see in the Mush community came from discussions had on Wora. Cherry-picking has its uses, when done by a craftsman. You end up with a better wine, for one.
I also talked to @Jeshin one on one as a reasonable human being, and I respect him. In your lack of reading back pages, you have undoubtedly missed where he said he was okay with this level of conversation on OR.
Yes, your boss said this kind of conversation was okay. Frustrating, infuriating, stress-inducing, but not bad. I can respect that, and have defended him many times in this thread as well.
So your own over-simplified, leading question can get Socratic with itself.
- Do you feel that Jeshin and Crayon have failed to answer your questions to your liking due to some sort of illicit intentions, or do you feel like it's possible that there has been a breakdown in communicating clearly across the aisles?
Yes. Many, many times, yes. Most of them, yes. Do I feel that it's because of a lack of understanding? Absolutely, and I have said as such, and found different ways to say as such. You, yourself, are introducing ideas not mentioned earlier in this thread meaning that of three OR representatives, no two of them have given the same viewpoint of what OR is about.
And respectfully, no, I'm not going to show you examples of this. There is a limit of how much time I'm going to spend on your project. I have stuff of my own I need to get done.
- Do you care enough about furthering the conversation to get the information or answers that you seek to post them specifically and clearly, and directly to me?
If you don't understand the answer to this by now, then you're not paying much attention. You want things to be in a way that you want them, which is a big reason why I don't trust you. You could have said: I don't get it, Theno, when you say xxx because I see yyy. Did I mention what I think of the Socratic method? I'm not twelve, and I'll ask you not treat me as such; please read what's in front of you.
To you, though? I've also made a very simple, straight-forward statement twice now. I don't understand why you're not understanding the words: You First.
Be engaging, and you will be engaged. Be honest, and you will be respected.
@Jaunt said:
@Thenomain said:
"It's up to you, not me, to be reasonable."
If you have specific issues that you would like a specific response to in regards to OR, direct them to me and you will receive what you're looking for. If you don't care anymore, then don't care anymore.
I have two immediate issues with your method of response:
You may not be trolling, but you are acting (to over-simplify what's going on) abusive, which is why I don't trust you.
"If you aren't reasonable, I won't be. It's up to you how I respond."
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof
(Will edit post if a more appropriate fallacy is identified. Ad hominem, maybe?)
@Jaunt said:
@Thenomain - I find your assertion of what passes for reasonable conversation to be pretty limp.
Your assumptions, insults, and then wavering on engaging-not-really-engaging to be wishy-washy, and your general thrust of your conversation is far too appropriate for these boards. You didn't decide to rise above it; you've jumped in with both feet. For that alone, I don't see why I should engage you at the very level you hold in disdain.
I also don't believe that you have read what I've repeatedly been saying. I have answered the questions you're asking of me on more than one occasion; please give me a compelling reason to answer them again.
I'm not one to write anyone off after two posts, but if you really want to talk with me on a more reasonable level, make the effort please. @Jeshin did. My chat box is always open.