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What Is Your Preferred Play Style?
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Tempted to suggest adding on a ‘Glacial’ tag – meaning less than one pose round per day. Those scenes happen to me too – when agreed on with the others – but it would make it clear that when a scene is Async, that does not mean ‘take a week to respond’.
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
It’s async, stop just posing over or around me and actually let me contribute to the fuckin’ thing. It’s not my fault that you decided to all connect at the same time while I was asleep, because I live on the other side of the planet to you.
I’m not sure if this a reasonable request, honestly. Async scenes are already absolutely glacial in pacing, so are very similar to mass scenes in that way. Pose order doesn’t seem to make much sense there… I’d even argue that 3PR is too restrictive for async scenes and that having it just be folk posing whenever they can is more logical.
When time between poses can literally take days, having a pose order is onerous in an extreme. How long can someone hold up an already extraordinarily slow scene before it’s considered a problem? Sure, there’s communication, but when poses are counted in terms of days, that’s the same type of lag you’ll get for any OOC communiques which will just delay things further. The only reasonable solution, I think, is to throw out any semblance of pose order and just pose whenever, even if that means some people are just ignored because they’re taking days to pose while everyone else is RPing at the breakneck pace of several hours.
Another reason I don’t like async scenes, honestly, though I just assumed as a natural course that async scenes didn’t have a pose order so didn’t mention it.
Lack of structured pose order is also why I’m skittish to participate in mass scenes, but that’s a different topic.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Async scenes are already absolutely glacial in pacing
If they were that slow, I wouldn’t be complaining about how fast they are, would I?
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Async scenes are already absolutely glacial in pacing
If they were that slow, I wouldn’t be complaining about how fast they are, would I?
It’s a relative thing. Async scenes are typically paced in the multiple hour per pose range up to days per pose. That’s still agonizingly slow compared to synchronous, which tends to top out at the tens of minutes.
If everyone in an async scene is taking mere hours to produce one pose, while someone else is taking days, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for everyone else to just ignore the person until they pose. Just like in a sync scene where someone has to idle for an hour, they’re usually removed from the pose order until they return.
ETA: And since the length of time per pose in an async scene is so wildly variable, the only practical solution is for everyone to pose just whenever they can.
Maybe a way around this would be for async scenes to have a maximum time-to-pose, after which the person in the pose order is skipped and the next is given their time. Have the Max Pose Time be a parameter when setting up a scene. I don’t know how conducive to this code change Ares would be, though.
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@STD Except none of that applies to what I said. Timezones exist, and if you don’t want to allow for that, then either say so or play synchronously. If I have to wait hours for the Americans to wake up and continue, then they can do the same for me.
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
@STD Except none of that applies to what I said.
Maybe I’m being stupid, but I don’t understand how none of that applies?
If I have to wait hours for the Americans to wake up and continue, then they can do the same for me.
This is what seems unreasonable to me. At such large variances of pose times, it seems perfectly fine for those that can pose quicker to do so, exactly like in mass scenes. There doesn’t seem to be another practical way to do that and not have async scenes take so long that any interest or context of them is completely lost.
Async scenes already take days. Do you really want them to take weeks or months? Long after whatever happened in them is relevant or can be referenced in ongoing RP?
Timezones exist, and if you don’t want to allow for that, then either say so or play synchronously.
Okay, this is more reasonable. Setting expectations at the front for the maximum of how long poses should take is good. That way, no one is blindsighted. Again, though, there’s no real support for this feature as is. Async scenes have such a broad diversity in what is considered acceptable pose times that the only reasonable solution is to have everyone just pose whenever they can.
I guess as a stop-gap, there could be an OOC note added to the scene description along the lines of ‘this is an async scene and participants are expected to pose once at least every four hours’. Players who can’t meet that minimum can then just choose not to participate.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Do you really want them to take weeks or months?
I want to be able to play the goddamn game as more than an interesting prop.
I think it’s unreasonable that I join a scene, get one or two poses in before all the Americans go to bed, and then I wake up (not more than a few hours later than prime time EST) to find the scene’s done with and i barely got to participate.
If you’re able to sit and pose quickly, while others in the scene can’t? Do something else!
ETA: It’s been fifteen-plus years of making allowances to my schedule to be convenient to Americans. Async exists now, so everyone should make allowances for each other. Tough shit that things take longer.
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I… really don’t know what else to say. I just can’t find this to be a reasonable request. It seems directly analogous to mass scenes to me, and the hobby as a whole has already decided on the best response to those: 3PR. Anyone who can’t pose fast enough gets skipped.
The problem might be with me, since I can’t do async scenes. I mean, one of the reasons I was attracted to MUing way back in the day over PBE or forum RP games was because of the immediacy of it.
If a scene is going to take weeks or months (or even days) to go through, then that just seems like a better fit for forum or PBE RP to me.
I fully admit I might just be out of touch here because I don’t do async. I’ll extract myself from the discussion here.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
I fully admit I might just be out of touch here because I don’t do async.
Then why did you try to speak as if you had knowledge of the subject? It’s incredibly condescending to suggest my request at being able to participate asynchronously is unreasonable when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Then why did you try to speak as if you had knowledge of the subject?
Because it’s not rocket surgery. I didn’t think specialized knowledge was required. I don’t know a thing about farming, but I can raise a desk cactus. It simply didn’t occur to me that async etiquette was very complex or different. As I said previously, I considered it analogous to mass scenes. Maybe I’m wrong.
It’s incredibly condescending to suggest my request at being able to participate asynchronously is unreasonable when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
That was not my intention. As I said, I didn’t think the problem was complex or deep. It seems self-evident to me. Maybe I am wrong.
Fuck me, I guess, for daring to think something was obvious, reconsidering that, and admitting possible fault and lack of understanding. How condescending of me.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
I don’t know a thing about farming, but I can raise a desk cactus.
Well, to use this analogy, you lectured a farmer on what reasonable expectations are for farmers. So just stop.
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The problem here, for Europeans and others outside of US timezones, is that if scenes move while we sleep – then the risk is very great that we essentially get reduced to sidelined NPCs. Sure, we’re welcome to pose if we can get a word in but everything happens while we sleep. At best, you get to join events and see the group take off while you go to bed.
Async has problems of its own for sure, but at least it allows those of us who can’t sit up past midnight every night to actually play.
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Pavel’s point seems entirely reasonable to me? It sounds like he’s experiencing people playing and finishing a scene more or less synchronously while he’s asleep. Which defeats the purpose of setting something as async.
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Could an admin maybe split the slap fight off somewhere else? Most of this was pretty thoughtful opinions.
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@glitch It seems like an on-topic part of the discussion if people can just put their Polite Pants back on.
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@Roz As a someone famous I know once said “I DONT CARE ABOUT THE POINT”
I’m probably biased living a time-shifted life, but for what it’s worth, I do think that Pavel is right and it would be polite to stick to async if it’s an async scene.
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I’m pretty adaptable. If I can finish a scene that day, awesome. That’s my preference. If it takes me more than that? It’s cool as long as we’re posing semi-reasonably and communicating.
However, when I returned to Ares games after a break, I did run into a few people that just… Stopped posing. Sometimes for over 12 hours with no communication at all. Then when they did, they told me they hadn’t forgotten me and would pose soon.
Posed once. Vanished for hours again.
In the meantime? They started a new scene.
Nah, no thanks. I closed up the scene, moved on. They apologized and said they’d make it up to me. I never heard from them again.
Long story short. Communicate your expectations. Let the other person decide if that’s the scene for them. Don’t be rude.
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For some reason, my mind works so much better for async scenes when it’s just two people. Probably less distractions.
Which really, about 80% of Ares scenes you’re going to see on the Active Scenes list is going to be between two people. That’s not bad, I just think that’s the nature of things in current MUing climate, largely because I think general agreement/consensus is that event type scenes will usually be done live and sync
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The whole reason 3PR exists is that in a traditional scene, if one person goes to put out a fire, 10 people might be sitting for 30 minutes because nobody’s posing.
In async, is that a problem? Why not just use a pose order in async scenes?
I feel like the culture of async scenes is going to end up like the culture for correspondence chess, where you might play many scenes/games at once, and just at regular intervals sweep and update the ones you have to post an update to.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
When time between poses can literally take days, having a pose order is onerous in an extreme. How long can someone hold up an already extraordinarily slow scene before it’s considered a problem?
I think part of the issue is that async RP is relatively new to MU mainstream, and we’re still figuring out its associated etiquette.
But it’s been around for quite awhile in other mediums, and we could draw from there for inspiration.
I haven’t done much forum RP, but in Storium everyone makes one pose for a round, in any order. Then the scene moves on. It’s a lot like how FS3 combat scenes work, really.
If someone is dragging things down, it’s OK to skip them, but how long you’re expected to wait varies by game. Some give a day, some a week, some indefinitely (that one doesn’t work well). So yes, establishing that common expectation is important. (There is also an accommodation for two chars off having a separate side convo.)
But whatever you decide, waiting until they’re not asleep doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request. Otherwise the scene will pass them by so much that they can’t meaningfully participate.
