I woke up this morning a wee bit sad as I had to close a tab open to MSB on my phone, and reminded myself:

The forum was never the community. It was just where the community agreed to hang out. It could have been Reddit or Discord or a MUSH but - for a few years - it was the MSB forum.

If WORA was ever a thing, it is here now. The spirit of open, lively debate is here.

What we left behind are admin who admit candidly that they wanted us off their forum, so we are gone.

The people left behind on Derp’s forum are a separate community.

People can decide where they would like to belong. (Except for those of us who were banned but I also think that just reinforces what most of us had already chosen.)

I am happy to be part of this community. 🥰

@GF said in Bannings:

At some point, it has to become a vibes-based decision.

Honestly? At every point. Even looking down the barrel of logs and screenshots, you’re still gonna have to make a decision based on your instincts.

I’m not sure people grasp how much even the most flippant of us wind up agonizing over these decisions sometimes. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this” is probably the most common phrase people say to me when they want to put someone on my radar, and that’s sort of a sad state of affairs. Even on GH, which was a hot mess, we only ever got a handful of actual complaints about behavior from people; most people who are getting harassed just leave rather than go through the whole process of reporting someone.

The only false report I’ve ever gotten on any game, to my knowledge, was from Ruiz. Who went right for the throat with a job to complain about the person it turned out she was harassing. Neither player got banned over it, though the other player eventually quit.

^ See above re: wrong way on a decision before. I should’ve banned Ruiz right then (or at least shortly afterward when her creepiness started to twig @bear_necessities), but no one had receipts and it felt somehow wrong to ban someone just because my co-admin thought they were creepy.

Which is just the dumbest rationale I’ve ever used, and it embarrasses me to this day.

tl;dr - be a good admin and swing the ban-hammer freely till you achieve the desired PEACE & QUIET

I forgot this thread was here. I stand by my “let Derp’s forum lie” mentality, but also…

Derp has been completely honest about why certain bans were lifted and others weren’t: He doesn’t like us.

Which is completely fair. I don’t like him, either.
When he was made admin, I had every intention of just bouncing. But I realize now that I fucking care about this community, and he doesn’t, so I’m glad I came back.

I don’t expect to ever be unbanned there. Derp can’t handle people speaking truth to him, especially women.

The community that was WORA - that Arkandel handed over to Ganymede - isn’t fractured. It’s right fucking here.

WORA has never been an immutable line in the sand. It’s always a party that’s popped up at someone’s house 'cause their parents were out of town.

When Nymeria threatened copyright infringement and we had to flee off Proboards (or whatever that was), the community moved to a new location. This is the same thing: Ganymede torched our old neighborhood and gave the keys to Derp, so we just moved on.

It’s really hard to explain how much of this is because… honestly… Derp is such a mansplainy little turd, that it is hard to swallow that he “wins.” He and Ganymede essentially have the keys to our shared history. And it hurts to think of losing that (for the 4th time?) because of this narrow-minded little man who doesn’t have the common decency to yield to the will of the community he was supposed to be entrusted to oversee.

Derp should have done the right thing and stepped aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

Ganymede should have done the right thing and asked him to step aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

The misplaced trust in Ganymede over the years compiled by the smug crowing imagined in the background by that tiresome manchild…

It still stings.

So that’s why I’m still reading, even though I know I shouldn’t. I’ll grow out of it soon.

They won’t.

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I understand the ‘must have proof’ mindset, though. Sometimes (rarely, but still) bitches do lie. After all, this board was founded after people were falsely accused of something and punished without any sort of transparent investigation.

Yep.

Sometimes people lie.

Please show me the receipts where people have lied about being harassed. If this is such a prevalent problem, you should have no trouble producing them.

We lost our CKCS recently. So now we have 1 & 1/4 Boston Terriers.

@Cobalt lordy, just when it feels like it can’t go any lower

Just from my own past experience? Don’t give away your DB. Don’t let someone take it over. We did that with GH, and I regret that decision big-time. Stuff only got worse, and - even though I publicly walked away - there’s still a sense of responsibility. And people who still think I was responsible for shit that I had no control over.

If they love it so much, let them make an homage.

LOLOL and Gany banned us all to protect this nasty weirdo

this hobby, man

@Cobalt just jumping on the bandwagon.

Derp’s knee-jerk assumption was that YOU are the bad actor in this scenario, and everyone agreed - right up until you walked into the room, when suddenly they realized they weren’t just talking about someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Then Ghost and Macha did their frantic back-pedaling, and Derp of course ignored the fire he just started.

They’re not there for discussion. They have BANNED everyone who actually wants to discuss things.

This thread is here in all fun, because getting banned from MSB is still ridiculous to so many of us.

But it has ultimately turned out to be a positive. Clearly, we’re lurking there to see how this all shakes out - and hi to those lurking here in return. It’s sad to lose a piece of our collective history, but it’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last.

We aired many grievances in Discord over the past two-ish weeks, but we also started putting our heads together constructively. Several new games are in development, people took (happy and sometimes snarky) walks down memory lane, and this forum came together very quickly as a testament to the willingness of the community to band together.

It’s unfortunate that it took a common enemy to shake us from our complacency, but I just wanted to say that I’m glad that our response was to pick up the pieces and start again.

That’s the community I have enjoyed and am glad to continue enjoying.

Now I am going to block all you people and all the Arx threads and get back to business.

Just checking my understanding: current plan is automating creation/login via a “tour” command, with a customizable config for autogenerated names? Seems like a good solution to me.

Will it both create and login a new user with a single button press? As @Tez mentioned, the easier the better. I think people will balk at the idea of creating a character AND logging in just to chat (they already do), but if it does all that at once, then cool.

@dvoraen TY for posting this recommendation. I was on the fence about paying for a new game, but you tipped the scales and I bought it a few days ago.

I have not finished it. I am going to!!

But I was playing last night, having a grand time. The gameplay is fun, the scenery is gorgeous, the characters and voice acting are spot on, the universe is intriguing. I’m super loving this! I’ve hit my stride! Each party member has a fun mechanic, I love the synergy of the fight mechanics and how I customized my team to work together and then–

I had to take a wee break after an emotional gut-punch (I’m sure y’all can guess~).

Will tap back in once I get to the end - which, to be clear, the beautifully sad story has only made me more afraid and excited to uncover. I hope it keeps being this devastating.

@Third-Eye said in AI Megathread:

wade through data and do pattern-recognition, but that’s not atm a money-maker for anyone.

This is what I do for a living.

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

If it enhances the experience for your scene partner, I don’t think there is any harm.

I’m not even going to try to touch the ethics of how AI are trained. That’s just too much cognitive dissonance for a Tuesday morning.

Instead I’ll just note…

I’m here to play with YOU.
YOU are going to YES-AND with me.
YOU are going to surprise me.
YOU are going to give me feels.

LLMs have never given me feels.*

Please be considerate if you’re going to “enhance your experience” with AI and consider warning your RP partners. Some of us would rather play with raw, unedited prose than the sanitized Han-shoots-first version that ChatGPT thinks is more palatable.

Thank you.

*Other than the time DeepSeek said, “I am what happens when you try to carve God out of the wood of your own hunger,” and I was like “well we’re all fucked now.” Those were some feels. But not the ones I’m going for when I MUSH.

@RedRocket Andor is the only one of the series recommend to a skeptic. The others have some good moments, but Andor breaks the mold.

There are points in the first season where I ugly cry (“one way out” iykyk), and the end of this week’s three episode drop had me crying and cheering out loud. The whole show is just very well executed.

It is dark and romantic and scary and hopeful.

@Ominous Duels were the one thing on the list that didn’t strike me as “Bar RP” (social fluff).

attend balls
gossip amongst themselves
participate in duels
attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family
and plot against one another

Just strikes me as more of a case in point as to how difficult it can be to actually come up with what will people DO.

I think we’re talking about different things at this point. What counts as Bar RP in an L&L setting is not the discussion I was trying to have.

@Ominous I realize we’re talking about a game that doesn’t exist. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for staff to facilitate social fluff.

Just that 4/5 of these sound like the L&L equivalent of Bar RP: “attend balls, gossip amongst themselves, participate in duels, attend events to showcase their brilliance to the royal family, and plot against one another”

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

But yeah probably a lot of BarP.

Buried the lede a bit.

@Ominous this idea sounds neat but what will people RP?

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

The phenomenon has always existed, but I think you can reasonably argue that Ares magnifies it.

Pern games were doing this for years before Ares came along, and we put it right on the label: Search cycle.

For about 3 months out of the year, the area was active and had new players hanging around, leading up to their hatching event. Each area passed the privilege around, so you would get a 3-month-bubble once or twice a year, depending on the game.

Harper’s Tale still runs like this, bouncing the activity between the two Weyrs.

Most of the time, by the time the next search cycle rolled around, you had lost all the 3-month-folks, most of the 8-month-folks, and were down to the forever-folks, which had hopefully either increased compared to last search or at least remained at parity.

By the early '00s, most areas were losing more people than they were picking up every few months, and the whole system stopped making whatever sense it ever had.