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Comments
5 pages of argument about essays on the forums for a text based game??? It was nice knowing you, Saturday afternoon.
@Iocun, don't be silly. No one is saying BAN THEM FOREVER, just that essays as a foundational requirement for advancement is misplaced and of minimal utility to most individuals or to the game. @Mathonwy is saying they have a role post-HR5 and I would go so far as to say that maybe they have a role pre-HR5 but only if there are other options: if writing essays in your free time is really a dream come true, I guess that's fine. Knock yourself out...but don't let your preferences drag everyone else down.
@Sarapisdoesn't need to write an announce post (but if he does, let's make sure it is at least 200 words and gets approved by a novice aide!). He just needs to tell the patrons to have a heart to heart with house leaders. I'll take the liberty to ghostwrite that conversation here: "If you can't think of a single more creative or interesting option to provide in lieu of or alongside essays as a requirement for advancement, please write Me a 200 word resignation letter so that we can memorialize your legacy in the house library for no one to ever read."
Dibs on @Lyndee.
Yes. All subsequent house leaders, however, read the entirety of the announce news board upon assuming their positions.
Lyndee said:
lolwat. Did you follow this conversation at all?
Where is that WTF button when I need it?
Lyndee said:
No, but with announce posts there is at least a reasonable chance that they read it. With just telling current house leaders, there is none. Plus, announce posts are an accurate source one can point a house leader to. Hearsay about "we were forbidden to do this and that" tends to be seriously distorted at best.
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Not true at all. Where is it written that a House leader can't chuck everybody out of the House and make it Her own personal House, for instance? It's not. But everybody knows not to do that. That's how culture works - it's a mechanism for transmitting knowledge and experience over time.
No decisions made yet in any case.
I'd claim that it is more game+forum culture that makes such things work than house culture. One tends to hear such things far more often through OOC sources than through IC ones, and often only after somebody "went too far" and got shrubbed for something. This makes sense of course, since it is OOC knowledge, that shouldn't be spread IC.
But that doesn't really matter and has no actual effect on the subject.
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I sure did follow it! Fortunately, I didn't post Because I need your approval, or else I might be insulted by your demonstrated lack of willingness to engage with the substance of a relatively cogent argument.
Aaanywayyyy, just to make sure we don't realize 2 pages from now that we have different definitions of what we mean by "patron" and "leader," the role of organizational patrons is to make clear the expectations of the administration to players. The role of organizational leaders is to put careful, critical thought into shaping a fun and interesting world.
Having led orgs, I always found that it was quite common to have suggestions/corrections offered by the org patron to make sure we were doing our best/most creative work in line with their expectations to maintain a positive player experience and their desire for orgs to uphold their role in faction conflict. Especially in times of transition! All I'm saying is that this is no different than the way a patron would likely intervene to prevent any number of abusive tendencies from org leaders. If you don't want to argue the substance and instead argue that enforcement in a world rife with magic and divine decree would be the problem, I'm not going to engage with you on that any longer.
ETA: partially ninja'ed by Sarapis.
God damnit @Lyndee your personality is hot.
What? This entire conversation was about the delivery/enforcement, rather than the substance. We all agreed on the substance of "essays suck" eternities ago.
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As it pertains to writing requirements for people under HR5, my suggestions:
1. Requirements of length (so many words, etc.): out. Pass or fail based on quality, not quantity.
2. Requirements that are fundamentally non- or minimally-interactive ('come up with thoughts on a subject, write them in a letter/journal, and show them to someone'): out. This is an online multiplayer game, not World of Wordpad.
3. Requirements that are broader in scope or require significant investments of preparation beforehand must be interactive in nature (discussions, lectures with Housemembers/citymembers, things you can actually do in-game with other players to benefit the roleplay landscape of the game generally and the House specifically) and commensurate with its place in the hierarchy of requirements, as approved by the House's patron.
Lyndee seems nice enough, and I don't even disagree with a lot of what she says, but I am totally mystified at the extremely positive reaction she is getting from forumers based on a couple of lukewarm humorous posts that (and I'm actually sort of on the opposite side from Iocun) actually do seem to show she didn't read or understand some important points in the thread, and are kind of light on content. Then again, because forums.
EDIT: and to be fair, 34 pages, really? But yeah, the forums are always a strange creature.
Whatever though, Sarapis will do what he's going to do, and it seems he's going to deal with overly burdensome writing requirements, period.
To be fair, @Iocun, you've jumped from 'unenforceable' to 'they have their place in theory' to 'houseleaders need to have the freedom to fail in re: essays' to 'what is an essay' after we'd been arguing about it for the better part of two days. Her take on it is p. valid.
Also, @Jules, Lyndee has literally 66 forums posts. I mean... what persona?
Yeah, that's pretty much why I'm mystified/curious. I assume she has a big footprint in-game, as she mentioned being a HL, but Iocun has forum phase :P And he's one of those who has it based on being consistently balanced/reasonable (even when I mostly disagree with him, as I do right now).
This discussion only started on page 30.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
wat
She's getting a positive response because she posted something good. I mean, content comes before forum-status, and if she doesn't want to get involved with the forums, who can blame her?
Thanks for spelling these out.
I do agree with the general direction of these, even though in practice it might still be hard to tell whether a particular requirement falls under these or not (esp. 3). But maybe that's just because I had to look up "commensurate" in a dictionary. It also seems to imply that even a requirement for a super high house rank may not be broad plus non-interactive?
What do you mean with "as approved by the House's patron"? That the house hierarchy itself must be approved, or that any requirements that are "broader in scope" must be approved? I wouldn't be very fond of the idea of having to get patron approval for every single requirement that might be considered "broad in scope".
In the end, I'm still not fond of enforcing those things by threat of banhammer and I still believe that the same result can be achieved more "diplomatically" just as well.
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I think it's fairly natural to ask "what is an essay" after arguing about them for the better part of two days and it becoming more and more clear that almost everyone here seems to define it differently.
I have indeed jumped between different arguments. But that was mostly due to the entire discussion constantly shifting. After all, I was dealing with someone who jumped from agreeing to "ban all writing tasks" to "some writing tasks are still ok and the whole issue needs to be looked at more broadly".
And then someone jumps in and makes a few snarky remarks, implying that I was an idiot for assuming that the point I was arguing against might indeed have been as blunt as "ban essays", and that I was somehow fond of essays and trying to protect them by all means. How is that a valid response to the conversation in any form?
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Although...
Upon re-reading @Lyndee's first post, I now realize that I misread one sentence as offensive, which wasn't offensive at all:
"...but only if there are other options: if writing essays in your free time is really a dream come true, I guess that's fine. Knock yourself out...but don't let your preferences drag everyone else down."
Somehow I missed that colon there, so I thought the part after it was actually directed at me instead of some virtual person. This cued a somewhat offensive post of my own, for which I hereby apologize.
Let that be a warning to you kids: NEVER MISS A COLON.
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It applies to writing requirements for people under HR5, not higher ranks.
If it has a length requirement, it needs to go.
If you have to write something and put it in a journal or letter or whatever solely to show it to someone and/or have some quick 'hey, neat' discussion so they can tick off a requirement box, it needs to go.
If you're making someone invest a lot of time into doing something broad like researching an event in your House's history or thinking creatively on an ideal, make it interactive so it's not taking time away from other RP things they and others could be doing.
Example on what I mean in: re commensurate to hierarchy of (sub-HR5) requirements: 'hold a thorough discussion with the House on what you've learned and how it's prepped you for full membership' is better-suited to an HR4, threshold-of-graduation-to-full-membership requirement than it is something you do at HR3 to get to HR4.
If there's any doubts about a requirement, hey, that's why orgs have patrons.
There, those are sentences that even I can understand!
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Seriously, Lyndee is the least offensive racist I know of.
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
that's racis
I saw @Lyndee kill a camel once.
At least it was not a mule.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
burro
So I think this one's blown over, but that's actually another interesting forum mechanic. For certain situations, you actually can't fight your own battles, no matter who you are (not that this was actually at that point, but close-ish).
EDIT: definitely well-known/liked IG by some regular forumers based on jokey comment chain ^^^^ Eh, but pretty typical forums stuff. It really does have some patterns to it.
I fail to understand where you are coming from or the relevance.
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important