Yes, you are absolutely correct. But first, I don’t like making my players do things that can be automated, second, Power Play is usually already a problem without giving away all this freedom.
Since some people may be interested in overpowering others in direct contests and challenges (which is totally fine, as long as they’re fair), they may be tempted to cheat a bit here and there. And some could complain about people who are presumed to cheat but in reality do not.
It is a much, much bumpier road. Too much so, in fact, for something hardly anybody here seems to have experienced.[li] edited by Xaphedo on 12/17/2013
Well, it’d be a lot of work but you can confirm stats. If a player is brought into question you can have them display their stats one at a time on their mantelpiece. edited by Sara Hysaro on 12/17/2013
[color=#009900]to confirm what folk said upthread- our attitude to play-by-chat would be the same as to all the other FL RPing going on in various contexts. This means that we wouldn’t object to it, and would regard it as fair use of our copyright if players acknowledge the source material, but we wouldn’t, I’m afraid, link to it or give any kind of access to our systems or data.[/color][li]
[li]
We’d recommend not writing a post about a ‘big, scary change’ late at night in the future. We apologize if our response came off as irate; we were rather tired ourselves at the time. We did try to make it clear we found the post interesting (our exact words were, "There is a truly glorious response in its place,").
Again, we’re sorry the tone of our post was what it was. It was inappropriate, whatever our feelings. Again, though, if you feel that you are presenting an idea which might not be taken very well, it’s best to wait until you’re sure you can present it in as bright a light as you can. We were not the only person that felt the post was confusing. The new OP is far better; we’ll edit our post to reflect that.
I refuse your apologies altogether.
Your response did NOT come up as irate, unjustified or generally inappropriate. Mine, on the other hand, was indeed an intentional and somewhat sordid attempt to jeer an improbable flaw. I realize there was no clear indication of a pure, humoristic vein, but I first thought the inner absurdity and extravagance of the admonishment would have been enough.
Quite clearly now, I was wrong.
Perhaps you find a couple of players interested in this, and they want to play characters named Maria and Pietro Wasserman. You ask them to describe their characters and you create two accounts for yourself, using pbcmariaw@xaphedo.com and pbcpietrow@xaphedo.com. You create the names and portaits to match the desires of your players. You now have two characters that you own and to whom you have full access and control, but you choose to let others dictate the way those characters make decisions.
This would only be good for new or side characters, but you could do this right now, and string together an engaging play session using the mechanics and opportunities the game serves up to your accounts.
[quote=Xaphedo]I won’t question once again the usefulness of the downvoting system
[li] edited by Xaphedo on 12/18/2013[/quote][/li][li]
[/li][li]Don’t think it serves much of a purpose. Highly plussed people tend to have contributed a lot to the community. If someone suddenly developed a lot of red, might be interesting to moderators (or you should check and see if you’d been … abrasive in your language) - but only a few red, I wouldn’t worry about it. Meh.
You know what? I’m not a mod, I have no authority here whatsoever, and I don’t care about this topic, but as an long-time observer of, and participant in, Internet conversations:
Xaphedo, now is a good time to take a break from this conversation.
[quote=Xaphedo]
What I don’t get is why Jitbit (the software this server is using) thinks it’s a good idea to use this kind of rating to sift through posts and declare what’s the most relevant content and what it’s the least. [/quote]
Goodness. I had no idea upvoting or downvoting had any such use. I’ve never even noticed the ‘show rated messages only’ thing before. Interesting. If the majority of people are as unobservant as me, it won’t impact on whether people see your posts. I suspect people use it more as a ‘yey I like this’ than a ‘others should see this’ thing. Hey ho. I wouldn’t waste energy on it. If you really want to pursue it, contact JitBit. Don’t dwell on it here.
You’re sounding grumpy. That’s the kind of thing I’d previously downvote. Not because I thought it had any impact on visibility, but because grumpy is bad.
Anyway - I’m willing to bet a vast number of rats that almost no one regularly uses it as a filter (it’s not such a big/fast board that it’s needed), and most people use it as a way of communicating just their feelings about a post. So the only end impact is some red at the bottom of your post. Finding out that votes may impact visibility makes me want to never use them again. But because I doubt people do use the filter, I’m going to continue to use them in a ‘yey this made me happy’ and ‘boo this make me less happy’ sense.
(Seriously though - this is a mightily chilled forum on the whole. There are brief glitches which tend to resolve fast, but these are so rare that it means any tone adopted that would merely seem efficient on other places, seems overly brusque. Consider mock-Victorian role-playing demeanour (but not the language, for gods’ sakes), and you’ll be adopting approximately the right level of calmness to blend in.)
Edit: What the ocelot said, but more wordily. edited by babelfishwars on 12/19/2013
Xaphedo - this is a friendly internet forum, not a fight club. Take a deep breath, and perhaps think how your words will be taken before you post.
If the point of this thread was to say: “I’d like to set up a Fallen London play-by-chat roleplay game, would anyone be interested?” you might think about asking the mods to delete this thread and starting again, just asking that question simply and answering any questions that come up.
I did and still do intend to abandon this thread, be assured.
What I wanted was discussion on the subject, pure, simple and verbal.
What babelfishwars said about tone is true, I lacked of adaptability and of a true understanding of context. This, see, is why I value real communication so much, it is a wonderful little thing that can indeed solve problems.
My personal character is energetic and emphatic, I’ll try to mend that. In the meanwhile, forget about any play-by-chat site I may have wanted to dedicate to Fallen London: if this is what I ought to go through each time I make a slip before you can tell me what it is, well, I can’t commit to it.
Close this thread shut already.
EDIT: Since Admins (or whoever could) hadn’t yet closed or deleted this, I went and erased all my troublesome (and evidently undesired) posts.
[li] edited by Xaphedo on 12/20/2013