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There’s not even internal consistency, forget about citations.
You’re just not patient enough to see the big picture. We are all trapped on this train. It’s going to crash wether we like it or not. Just sit back and enjoy the tea while you still have service.
It’s going to suck for a while but long after you and I are dead that bright future will happen. Just not for us.
@Pavel
He stole it from Russia. Trust me, all wisdom comes from Russia. My Babushka would not lie to me.
Yes, A.I. is making it next to impossible to make a living as an artist, but it’s doing that to a lot of industry and it’s only going to get exponentially worse until it gets better, but here’s the thing, it will get better.
One of the very core concepts of capitalism is that you have to have a consumer base with money to buy the shit your robots are making.
It’s a race to the bottom, I agree. But when we reach that bottom there will be no choice but to implement some kind of universal income where people will be paid simply to exist because if they are not there will be no consumers left to buy anything. Also there will be no politicians left because we will have murdered them all.
When we talked about the promise of AI freeing us from menial labor, this is what that looks like. This is a stepping stone towards that future.
It’s going to be a painful and probably violent next few steps because capitalism is very slow to adapt and people who have resources do not want to give up anything to the people who have not. But it will change.
Even the smartest economists in the world have warned that we need to get ahead of it and start implementing some kind of new system before the total collapse of capitalism happens.
You look at this as greedy people taking away your opportunity to make a living off of doing the things that you want, but I see this as a greedy people dooming themselves to the destruction of the very capitalism that they bade their entire value as a human being on.
Just try and hold on, try to adapt during the transition and let them destroy themselves.
There is an old Russian proverb, “When your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt them. It is rude.”
@Evilgrayson I agree with you 100% on the morals. It’s just another way for the rich to take every last opportunity from the rest of us, but until we learn a better way than capitalism, this is what it we have to work with so I’m adapting because I want my crumb of the pie to be big enough to live on.
We should be arguing about vampire sex.
I’ve always found the idea of vampire sex silly. Who wants to bang a corpse and also, why would the vampire want to bang a sweaty, stinky, meat-sack that smells like day-old urine and too many chemicals? It’s bad enough you have to eat them to stay alive-ish, why would you want to rub your bits against them? It’s just gross!
@Pax
I thought I was pretty clear on that but if you need an itemized list…
Let people play what they want (within whatever theme you have) even if they are the “bad guys” because those kinds of characters generate IC drama that staff doesn’t have to spend their limited time manufacturing.
Make Chargen fast and easy to get a basic character so if you want to make an alt or if you want to kill off your character because you have grown tired of it you don’t have to spend weeks waiting to get back in the game.
Make retirement easier by making it so you can create a bog standard character using a quick CG system then once you kill off your main in a dramatic event have the XP transfer from them to the new guy.
Make factions actually matter. Give them territories to defend. This gives players something to RP off of outside of everyone hanging out at a doughnut shop.
Make clear rules about PVP where you need a justifiable reason to be engaging in PVP. Someone entered enemy territory, they attacked you, they attacked someone you are close to, etc. Then if you think they are just being a douchenozzle and attacking you for no reason you can call in a staff member and have them make a judgement call. If the reason for the attack is lame the staffer can just say no, this isn’t happening, both of you go back to your homes and don’t start fights with each other in the future.
If the reason is legitimate and it’s because of your IC actions but you don’t want to deal with it, you should have the right to negotiate the outcome and skip the battle itself. Maybe you have better shit to do?
If you can’t come to an agreement on a reasonable conclusion without the fighting happening then you could set terms, (to the death, to incapacitation, being taken prisoner, etc.) for the battle and do the fight or if you really just don’t want to do the combat mechanics, choose to do a roll-off to see who wins. Say for example, you are playing WoD, you could both add up the dice you would roll for your primary attack and the dice you would roll for your primary defensive roll, pool them all together, then roll them. The other guy does the same, who ever gets the most successes wins the fight.
You can skip hours of combat with one die roll or if you want to make it even simpler, have both people roll 1d100+their total XP spent. Who ever rolls higher wins. Or you can both roll 1d100, see who gets the highest number to see who wins then look at the difference in the numbers and let that determine the severity of the consequences of the combat.
There are a lot of options that don’t involve having to use chunky combat rules. Lay those options out ahead of time and let people have a choice.
Make it clear that going around picking fights for no reason will get you removed from the game. Also make it clear that just because you and one other person are in the game room it doesn’t mean that you are necessarily the only people in the room of the story. “I was mad and he was there so I picked a fight.” isn’t a valid IC reason for starting PVP. Unless the other player agrees to it you can just have them pick a fight with an NPC.
Don’t tell people what they can and can not do in the privacy of their own latex sex dungeons. Do tell people they can’t go around banging on the subway without suffering consequences. Make those consequences IC. Have the cops show up at their door step with a warrant for their arrest. Make a post about their public fuck session on their faction board because someone posted a video of it on TicTak so everyone can role play about seeing it.
Make the results of breaking the rules an IC response as often as possible because that moves the story forward instead of grinding it to a stop.
Do let people make stupid character concepts that you know will not work. Do also tell them why it probably won’t work out well for them. Maybe they are just new to whatever game you are running so they don’t know better? Maybe they want a challenge? Maybe they want to explore the dynamics of love and marriage by playing an ageing shoe salesman with a red-headed wife who he loves but can barely stand and two ungrateful kids? Let them do their thing.
Do let people innovate. (Within reason) Don’t be such a rules lawyer that you lose sight of the goal of people playing fun characters. Let them try novel things.
Do let people establish their own places of residence and customize them. Using coded apartment buildings you can rent is cool, but why not have coded houses that work the same way? Then if a player bails on the game, the rent comes due, the game sees they aren’t online for X number of days, then it kicks them off the lease and puts the house back up for rent with a default, fresh coat of paint, description.
Do let them blow shit up from time to time just for fun and leave it 'sploded until a reasonable amount of repair time has passed then let the owner of the property re-build.
Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. Don’t punish people for telling dirty jokes or saying things that are offensive on the non-public com channels or in pages.
It’s great to have a SFW channel like Public or Chat but for faction chats and such you should do as little forced censoring as possible.
Players should all be adults, they shouldn’t need a staff member to protect them from hurtful words. If you don’t like what someone is saying, tell them so politely.
They should be an adult and respect your wishes or maybe they will tell you to fuck off with your bullshit, and that’s also okay!
You can tell them to go to hell and get ass-fucked with a pinapple then +ignore them because that’s also something adults do.
We don’t all have to agree or think the same way.
They will piss off enough people in your faction that eventually they won’t be able to enjoy the game and move on to a new place to play because no one wants to be around them.
Staff doesn’t need to step in, players don’t need Staff to fight their battles for them. Staff’s job shouldn’t be playing thought police.
Staff’s job should be enforcing the rules of the game system, whatever system that might be, and facilitating play for people who do actually want to be around each other.
This concludes my Ted Talk, thank you all for coming.
@Roz Democratizing art is exactly what A.I. does.
I can’t draw worth a lick these days because my hands are shot but I can still make passable art for my hobbies because of A.I.
I can even run it locally. No corporation can control what I make.
I mean, I get that you’re mad that the fact so many people can enter the market and fill it with content that your content is devalued but that’s just progress. You too could learn to use it and flood the market. Plus, because you have actual skill yours would end up looking better and sell more than the people with no actual training or skill.
It is a total pain in the ass to get A.I. to understand object positioning so all those prompt jockeys who can’t draw have to take hours and hours to do something you can do with a simple sketch fed into the A.I. engine because you understand perspective and how distance should change scale and line width on a work.
Plus you are overlooking the radical advancements in what you can do to your images using open source image to image A.I. like Flux Kontext.
Have a sketch you want to turn into a detailed digital drawing of a space ship on a strange alien planet? You can spend 6 hours doing that or you can have the A.I. do it in seconds. Want the ship to have rusted metal plating? You can spend an hour painting in tiny, detailed, rust patches or you can lightly sketch them in and have flux add more detail the rust. You can make art with coloured pencil which the A.I. will understand than translate over into any style of art you want.
You are looking at this as if it’s taking away from artists when it makes you magnitudes more productive. You just haven’t given it a chance.
This analogy only works if the pencil is made of stolen materials.
Again, it’s not “stealing” anything. Not any more than any person with a pair of eyes seeing an image. It learns what things are by breaking them down into a format that it can understand and reference later. That’s not stealing. There are no copies of images of Micky Mouse in the files used to run the A.I.
It’s just math and code. You are making this thing seem way more magical than it is.
We’re talking about an “intelligent” … tool
That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t intelligence. That’s why I linked the video that explains how A.I. works. It is no more intelligent or capable of free will than any pocket calculator. It’s a very complex series of pass or fail checks that have become robust enough to give the appearance of intelligence but it has no will, no motivation, no real intelligence. That’s why image generation can have such freaky errors. It has no actual concept of what body parts are attached where or what any of the context of your prompts mean. It’s just taking a bunch of random noise and reducing that noise in a pattern which is likely to be similar to other patterns that it has seen before.
It’s not aware at all, at least, not yet. Once we get true A.I. then you can start making the arguments you are making now with some legitimacy but with the way it functions right now, it’s still just a very fancy pencil.
@Pax said in pvp vs pvp:
they wouldn’t be the bulk of what people are running and playing nowadays.
Oh, yes, such wildly successful games that have what, 12 active players who do maybe 3 scenes a week? That’s totally a thriving model for success you have there! No need to ever question it or try to improve! What was I thinking?! Must be the dementia!
Oh well, I guess the hobby will just die with us then.
We had a good run! It was fun while it lasted.
@Jennkryst said in pvp vs pvp:
Be the change you want to see!
I wish I could. I really do. I don’t want to get into details about it but when I say I don’t have the time left in life to dedicate to gaming, I mean I don’t have that much time left in life. I’m only on this forum so much today because I’m stuck in bed with an injury.
Basically: 
These kind of games really helped me when I was young. I want the next generation to have that same opportunity to find themselves lost in strange new worlds. That’s why I am on here ranting about this. I don’t want this medium to die out with us and it looks like it will.
Am I wrong? Is there some thriving hub of young people out there playing some game I’ve never heard of? It looks like this hobby has gone to seed because it’s been made so generic and uninteresting it can’t offer anything worth the effort of the barrier to entry.
@Hobbie said in pvp vs pvp:
You are seeing something you do not like, and you are insisting that others must try it your way.
I literally just wrote a small essay about how I don’t care if they do it “my way” or not. I just want them to consider that what hey have been doing isn’t working and try anything actually different instead of just hanging a new theme or setting on the same frame work full of bad ideas that have failed for decades.
If the manufacturer made an etch-a-sketch that knew how to draw Mickey Mouse and would draw it on command
The key part of your sentence there, legally speaking, is “on command”.
The toy isn’t creating an image of mickey, it is the person who issues the command that causes the image to be created.
If a company created an A.I. whose only job was to make as many copyrighted images of Micky Mouse as it could then you might have a viable legal case, but having a tool capable of being used to create that image is not the same as creating tool with the purpose of creating fraudulent content.
In order for them to win in court they would need to prove explicitly that the A.I. company trained their neural net to make images of the copywrited material for the explicit purpose of fraud and that is next to impossible to prove even if it was true, which it isn’t.
Think of it like this - your average home laser printer can render a passable copy the U.S. dollar. If you feed it the proper kind of cloth (not paper) you could manufacture counterfeit five dollar bills in the comfort of your own home. Does that make your printer illegal? Does that make your printer manufacturer, or adobe for creating photoshop software capable of making high quality print sheets a criminal?
No, the only person who would be a criminal is you, if you use those tools to print out fake money.
The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.
The same thing can be said about any human as well. If you see the mouse and have the talent to draw it, does that make you an evil criminal who was trained to destroy the profit margins of Disney?
It can’t be a crime to see things and learn from them. That’s just how reality works. What an A.I. does is no different than what a human does. If anything, it should be less culpable for fraud because it can not choose create images. A human must ask it to do so.
Again, I would like to point out that in any other industry this would be thrown out of court. If you sue Honda for making a car that drives faster one year than the model from the year before because drunk drivers might use it to drive drunk they would throw you out of court.
If you sued a bow and arrow company for making a more accurate compound bow because someone might use it to rob your bank, you would be laughed out of court.
There is no other industry where a tool can be held liable for the actions of the person using the tool. It’s inconceivable except in this one case because in this one case it scares the ever living shit out of corporations. They see A.I. as a direct threat to their market dominance.
If every wanna-be writer/director can make his own full length films at home, that’s the end of their monopoly. If everyone can be an artist, that’s the end of the “fine art” monopoly. Lowering the skill floor and democratizing media means more competition for the established players and that has investors freaking out. That’s the only reason this is even being given the time of day.
@Hobbie
I’m not the one trying to run games and as I said, I don’t care if the game caters to me. I don’t have the time to dedicate to a game like I used to. It just pains me to see the people running the few remaining games making the same mistakes time and time again.
It’s like watching Kamala Harris run her campaign into the ground because the DNC told her it was a brilliant idea to run the same playbook they used for Hillary Clinton and pay millions to hire the same consultants to run her campaign that Clinton had.
It’s like watching a football team keep making the same bad plays again and again because management thinks if they just keep trying, eventually it will work.
It’s like watching game or movie studio executives ruin projects because they think they know better than the writers and directors and no one stands up to them.
It’s like watching people tell the public that if we just keep giving the billionaires money trickle down economics will finally kick in and everyone will become well off.
I have reached a point in my life where I’m just sick and tired of watching people fuck up things because they listen to bad actors with a proven track record of being only out for themselves.
I’m not saying they have to do things my way, I’m just saying they are going to keep failing if they keep doing the same thing so maybe, try something that has worked before or something totally new!
Stop listening to the whiners who want to make everything safe and risk free. Be bold. Try new things! Innovate!
Or they can choose to keep making their games into, generic, bland cardboard boxes and be happy with hosting the few people who even know the hobby exists until they all die or old age and then the gaming medium will be lost forever. That’s also a choice.
If someone is going to be running games anyway, why keep doing it the way you can see with your own eyes is going to fail just like it has failed every time it’s ever been tried before? Stop doing things the way other people have told you is the right way and find your own way. That’s all I’m saying.
@Jennkryst said in pvp vs pvp:
Bold of you to assume that the space goo was not intedned to be like 75% for trolling for sex scenes.
Keeping it 100, I would be all up in that space goo if I was playing on a game with that as a species option. Remember Inque from Batman Beyond? She left an impression. Too bad she turned out to be such a scum bag.
@NotSanni
I’m not throwing a tantrum. I’m just telling you the truth as I see it. I watched these games that I loved go down the toilet because staff chose to coddle a few troublemakers and change the rules so that they would whine less.
The damage may be irreversible but if it’s not, it’s certainly going to take a drastic and revolutionary new approach. That’s all I’m saying. What people are doing now isn’t working. Try something else. Hell, try anything else. Just stop making the same mistakes over and over and over. That’s all I ask. Stop listening to people who are clearly leading you down the wrong path. Do something new. Do something different.
Look at what worked in the past and what didn’t. Be objective. Don’t listen to people who want to make everything about them. Ask yourself, what can we do differently to attract and retain new players?
Surprise me! Please!
I want the hobby I used to love to be worth playing again.
Okay, let me rephrase that so I am more clear. It is the person writing the prompt that is doing the fraud not the computer making the image.
It’s like suing a pencil manufacturer because someone used a pencil to draw Mickey Mouse. The people making the pencil didn’t do the crime. In the same way, the people making the A.I. shouldn’t be held responsible if someone else uses it for fraud and that is what these litigious companies are after.
They want to establish a precedent to make it so A.I. companies can held liable for damages if their code is used to do fraud.
Courts would never even consider this for any other industry.
If you went to court and sued Fruit of the Loom for making cotton T-shirts that criminals bought and used to make fake merch, you would be laughed out of court. A.I. companies are no different.
They can’t be expected to regulate everything the users of their products might ever do wrong. It’s an impossible ask or in legal terms, an “unfair burden”.
Any half decent lawyer should be able to win this case without breaking a sweat.
@NotSanni
I’m not saying that games are dying because they aren’t being run the way I want them to be played. I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.
The more generic and baby proofed the games became the more the player base dwindled away. What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.
Maybe, just maybe, you might want to think about why it worked back then instead of just dismissing the only time the medium was actually successful at retaining a large player base because it hurt the feelings of a few bad actors who just want to stir up shit and make drama.
Every year your player bases shrinks because people don’t find the games engaging and every year you double down on doing the same things that don’t work.
How many times are you going to make the same mistakes? Creating a new game with a different setting that is basically the same thing as the last game that collapsed with a slightly different coat of paint on it is never going to work in the long run.
You need to do something that works and the only thing with a proven track record of working is letting people play what they want to play. It’s probably too late now anyway. Even if you did stop trying to shoehorn everyone into the same bland box I doubt you will be able to entice enough players to try the text only format.
The whiny bitches won. They got what they wanted. The games are exactly the way they wanted them - and that’s why no one is playing them any more.