Post by jcarter on Jan 12, 2013 10:19:47 GMT -5
We could always use some more realtalk
from the Arm facebook page
from the Arm facebook page
J. Blaze Ward Kenzal Hunter, can you list those examples, please? All I can think of are moments where someone won out with patience because they either won a staffer over, or they had staff backing in the beginning. Probably the best example of this would be Pearl Kadius, which pretty much defines both examples. Limited staff backing in the beginning, ended up seriously winning over a staff member and then getting every one of her dreamseeds planted in the garden. Was there patience involved? Certainly. Did she do it on her own? Not by a long shot.
As for Halaster... seriously. Yeah, he played around with his PC. Yeah, he killed a bunch of folk. He twinked, he custom coded, he broke every rule he could. Know what else he did? Made the game seriously fucking fun through providing an antagonist someone could shake a stick at. Once word of the Plainsmans doing started to go around, the teamwork around Zalanthas went through the fucking roof. You did not go outside alone and expect to live unless you were looking for trouble, you seriously knew your shit, or you just didn't goddamn know better.
Know what else he did? Put in MAJOR fucking hours building and coding for the game. I know, because I picked up a few of his pet projects on his way out, and tried to see them through without the heavy hitting code knowledge that he had. Some of the shit Halaster built was fucking BRILLIANT, and he never would have had the ability to work with it or test it in a serious setting without having the Plainsman at his disposal. So gripe and whine all you want, but you can't move 20 rooms in that game without bumping into something Halaster either built, inspired, or masterminded.
And to touch on the thought that the playerbase is too thinskinned and cunty to support serious antagonistic PCs... abso-fucking-lutely. The amount of censoring the staff does on the GDB is largely in keeping with the downgrading of maturity and levelheadedness in the playerbase. It's a sad thing, but I've seen multiple plotlines fucking eradicated because some bitchy little player got his panties in a bunch. I even experienced one player come through multiple characters (I would give a conservative estimate of five of them) in an attempt to destroy two PCs that he just couldn't fucking touch. He finally used some dumbass newbie to spread OOC knowledge to, that dumbass newbie spread the OOC knowledge to the IG boards, and once the cat was out of the bag the jig was done. People died, plotlines got wasted, and all because this cunty bitch couldn't cope with the fact that he couldn't be top 'tok.
One of the major reasons that staff stopped doing staff-run plotlines was Arm 2. They decided to stop doing them so they could focus more energy on producing a corpse made of ones and zeros. Now that that corpse is recognized for what it was, namely 'the colossal, wasted shell of a game,' they should return to the immersive, massive plotlines that only staff can seriously back.
Here's the problem though: They no longer have anyone who can do it properly. They lost the Halasters. They lost the Bhagharvas. They lost the serious powerhouse storytellers who understood the simple truth that the Plotline Trumps The Game. Sometimes, as a storyteller, you need to break a rule...or three... or five... in order to make the game fucking live and breathe. Sometimes as a storyteller you can't spend the time tracking down your Boss to get authorization to do this or that... so you have a decision. Don't do it, and let the plotline die... or do it, and let the plotline live, but maybe look a little bit fucked up in hindsight. Halaster, Bhag, and the rest understood that they needed to break those fucking rules in order to keep things moving. They dealt with an AMAZING amount of shit from both staff and players in order to keep this game fun, to keep the game an amazing work of art that people would return to again and again for years to come.
And now they're gone.
*walks off stage*
As for Halaster... seriously. Yeah, he played around with his PC. Yeah, he killed a bunch of folk. He twinked, he custom coded, he broke every rule he could. Know what else he did? Made the game seriously fucking fun through providing an antagonist someone could shake a stick at. Once word of the Plainsmans doing started to go around, the teamwork around Zalanthas went through the fucking roof. You did not go outside alone and expect to live unless you were looking for trouble, you seriously knew your shit, or you just didn't goddamn know better.
Know what else he did? Put in MAJOR fucking hours building and coding for the game. I know, because I picked up a few of his pet projects on his way out, and tried to see them through without the heavy hitting code knowledge that he had. Some of the shit Halaster built was fucking BRILLIANT, and he never would have had the ability to work with it or test it in a serious setting without having the Plainsman at his disposal. So gripe and whine all you want, but you can't move 20 rooms in that game without bumping into something Halaster either built, inspired, or masterminded.
And to touch on the thought that the playerbase is too thinskinned and cunty to support serious antagonistic PCs... abso-fucking-lutely. The amount of censoring the staff does on the GDB is largely in keeping with the downgrading of maturity and levelheadedness in the playerbase. It's a sad thing, but I've seen multiple plotlines fucking eradicated because some bitchy little player got his panties in a bunch. I even experienced one player come through multiple characters (I would give a conservative estimate of five of them) in an attempt to destroy two PCs that he just couldn't fucking touch. He finally used some dumbass newbie to spread OOC knowledge to, that dumbass newbie spread the OOC knowledge to the IG boards, and once the cat was out of the bag the jig was done. People died, plotlines got wasted, and all because this cunty bitch couldn't cope with the fact that he couldn't be top 'tok.
One of the major reasons that staff stopped doing staff-run plotlines was Arm 2. They decided to stop doing them so they could focus more energy on producing a corpse made of ones and zeros. Now that that corpse is recognized for what it was, namely 'the colossal, wasted shell of a game,' they should return to the immersive, massive plotlines that only staff can seriously back.
Here's the problem though: They no longer have anyone who can do it properly. They lost the Halasters. They lost the Bhagharvas. They lost the serious powerhouse storytellers who understood the simple truth that the Plotline Trumps The Game. Sometimes, as a storyteller, you need to break a rule...or three... or five... in order to make the game fucking live and breathe. Sometimes as a storyteller you can't spend the time tracking down your Boss to get authorization to do this or that... so you have a decision. Don't do it, and let the plotline die... or do it, and let the plotline live, but maybe look a little bit fucked up in hindsight. Halaster, Bhag, and the rest understood that they needed to break those fucking rules in order to keep things moving. They dealt with an AMAZING amount of shit from both staff and players in order to keep this game fun, to keep the game an amazing work of art that people would return to again and again for years to come.
And now they're gone.
*walks off stage*
