One. Setting aside all the social aspects, going higher is a balancing nightmare, and there’s no way to square the drastic differences in player power without extensive homebrewing.
Have the other spheres represented by GMs (and only GMs), and don’t have them overshadow player power unless it’s in service of a Big Bad that will eventually be faced.
And just in general? Never stick Mage or Changeling in with Vampires or Werewolves. The power differential is just stupid.
Struggling pretty hard. I’m LGBTQIA+, and it feels like the US is becoming a more hostile place than ever. My partner and I are basically alternating between literal panic attacks and each day’s headlines feel like a fresh hell. Trying to prop up my community members spiraling in group chat, and I just don’t know what to say anymore.
In 2017, it was the stupidest timeline but we just had to knuckle down
In 2025, I’m out of jokes, and this feels like literal hell.
@dvoraen It’s been quite some time since I saw a trailer, raised a brow, and immediately set a reminder for the launch date on my phone. That looks like it could be pretty damn rad.
@Testament said in An Arx Peeve Thread:
The peeve is that I miss you. It was nice to have a place to go if nothing else to hang out.
Fuck you.
To expand on this peeve, a long commute means that I finally have an excuse to get back into reading for the first time in an embarrassing while (or listening, but whatever), and the first book I picked up was “The Way of Kings”, and now I have such a freaking longing for magical fantasy again.
I miss Arvum, I miss how scary magic felt, I miss Adepts, I miss the people I played with all the time, and I am cursing my total inability to get it together enough to want to try to bother to sandbox.
Popping by the Murder for a drink and a truly questionable stew, or the Training Center and bouncing around and hero-worshipping the folks who were kicking butt, or were brave enough to step into the ring. Miss lurking by the beach on a cold winter’s day, perched on a little rocky outcrop and gazing in the general vicinity of Cardia. Slipping through the darker places between the boroughs into the expansive world between and feasting on a truly unhealthy amount of wine and lemon bars.
Curses, y’all.
As adoption of AI has changed, my former views of ‘hey, this is a fun toy’ has changed into resentment. Mostly, eliminating drudgery and as a super-charged oft-lying google is all I’ve been using it for.
Ironic, as my assigned initiative at work for 2025 is to become the in-house AI specialist. Just what I always wanted, being the person whose product is a hammer in search of a nail, while also being responsible when the hammer decides it’s a fork about 20% of the time.
Tch.
Yeah, I think I kind of see it. In trying to be coy about the narrative in your attempt to courteously avoid spoilers, it resembles what some AI do in presenting a surface-level response to a prompt, a fun fact, and summarizing what you’ve just said in the final sentence.
It’s not like that’s a criticism of the review - it’s just (unfortunately) similar to the sort of thing that ChatGPT burps up, because … that’s the point, right? It recognizes what to look for in something classified as a movie review and pattern matches for it.
Per a reddit post on /r/MUD: https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/1geyisw/armageddonmud_permanently_closed/
ArmageddonMUD has been permanently closed. For more information as to why, you can visit the game’s discussion forum and the post regarding it here: https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,61081.0.html
On behalf of the ArmageddonMUD team, past and present, thank you to the players of our game that shared their time and passion with ArmageddonMUD. As we close the final chapter of this beloved world of bone swords we built together over 32 years, when we think back we’re filled with wonderful memories. Together, this community has shared epic battles, forged lifelong friendships, and lived countless stories. May these memories live in the hearts of all who walked the sands of Zalanthas.
-Halaster, Producer of ArmageddonMUD
There are some rumbles about some bad actors in staff freely sharing character interactions and disseminating RL information, and as it’s a closed codebase, some of the inner workings of the game.
Anyone have further insights?
Aw. 
When you find a video game and it’s lots of fun and then you look at the patch notes and see that it’s on maintenance mode and no longer receiving updates because it failed to capture a base within 8 months of launch. Live service games live such brutal, fleeting lives.
(Omega Strikers, for the curious.)
I whinged and complained about it in the complainy threads so much that it felt like cheating not to post the resolution:
After a year and a half, I got top bid on a house. And I’m so excited and terrified for the parts that come next, but the hunt is finally over!
@Coin They will. This being a tiny crunchy granola ‘we’re your friends’ employer, it was just a knife in the gut to see them treat it like a Fortune 500 company would.
Not surprising. Just disappointing.
The company that I’ve been proud to work for just made us sit through an hour long meeting that was a naked attempt to bust a union. Fifteen coworkers or so that I thought were cool toed the company line with prepared remarks and it was freaking nauseating to watch.
Friendship ended with company. LinkedIn is my new best friend now.
Guys, please watch Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End [Crunchyroll]
Elevator pitch:
Where most stories end, this one begins. Frieren is the quintessential nearly-ageless elf caster who is part of the Hero’s party. Together with her companions, she embarks on a journey of a ‘mere 10 years’, culminating in the defeat of the Demon Lord. All of this offscreen, as our story begins with a celebration of that accomplishment with a backdrop of a beautiful meteor shower that Frieren bemoans as underwhelming - she knows a better spot for it. The party goes their separate ways, agreeing to meet up for the next meteor shower - in a mere 50 years.
What follows is the gradual thaw of an emotionally distant character, learning to not take the passage of time so lightly, and recognizing that every relationship she has is more valuable than she realizes, and a new journey retracing her former party’s steps with her newfound apprentices, doing good deeds, slaying demons and dragons, and facing other trials along the way.
I have an unreasonable
amount of anime under my belt, and this one’s special. I’d recommend it to damn near anybody, even non anime watchers.
It’s slow without being boring, with some of the most peaceful imagery as connective tissue.
It’s earnest without being saccharine,
it explores loss without being mopey and what it means to continue on with the memories of your loved ones always at your side, their life inspiring who you continue to be as a person - that loss is never total as long as there’s someone to carry the memory of you forward.
Its action segments have no right to be as utterly captivating or beautiful as they are for what’s sold as a ‘drama’.
And Frieren is a loot gremlin who can’t help but check every treasure chest. Every. Treasure chest. Even the mimics.
This is the best Fantasy show I’ve seen, hard stop, and it’s worth your time to give it the 3 (or 4) episode test no matter what your tastes in anime are. There’s something to like here for everyone.
(Note: Episodes 1-4 were released as a combined drop and were meant to be watched in one sitting. Optional, of course, but it’ll give you the proper impression of the show’s overall tone vs. just watching Episode 1.)
Did I mention it’s the current number one anime of all time on MAL?
When the flip side of executive dysfunction kicks in and suddenly every task feels trivial and you just hammer through a week’s worth of roadblocks in under an hour while bopping around in your office chair to hype-up music and taking periodic dance breaks.
Unsure! But there is a Recipes thread that might be able to help?
So, in full transparency, I didn’t care for Alan Wake II because the plot didn’t grab me and the gameplay loop wasn’t quite my jam.
But holy hell it’s a gorgeous game. The dingy interiors, the oppressive way that the woods close in on what should be ‘wide open’ levels make it feel claustrophobic in a way that really works for a horror setting. I didn’t feel relieved to be outdoors, I felt uneasy. It’s got such a cohesive art design that I really need to give kudos.
And that one level (I’ll just be vague here since spoiler tags are being a butt, but you know. The one with lots of video.) was just so out there and different that I was giggling throughout. Such a fun idea, and brings to mind similarly freaking weird portions of the Max Payne franchise.
A lot here to like.
A similar note: I cannot stand when games micro-update and it breaks all of my mods.
Beat Saber, I swear to god I do not care that you just added a new Fall Out Boy DLC that I can buy for $9.99 or whatever, let me get my library of like 400 modded songs back.
To your point, I do think that one of the most important things is to be absolutely transparent about what is acceptable. Codified into the documentation, warned about in character generation. At that point, you’re consenting to an RP-PVP experience, and know what to expect.
Now, another thing that comes to mind in a PVP-allowed environment are things that are harder to control. That typical host of other baggage such as extremely vindictive and insular groups that can torment players that they dislike, gang up on newbies to control any ingame resources, and pressure IC actions due to the fear of character loss.
That’s some people’s jam, or else EVE Online, Rust, Ark: Survival Ascended, etc wouldn’t be a thing.
I don’t know if I’d be up to the task of policing it.
@GF said in General Video Game Thread:
Sephiroth didn’t betray and murder Cloud’s father. He is Cloud’s father.
