End of Year Discussion Post

[animusmods]

It's the beginning of the end of the world of 2012, Animus! The game has been open for about eighteen months, and since it's the end of the year, let's have a discussion post. Here's how this is going to work: this post will be divided up into subcategories, and you guys can discuss among yourselves and with us whatever you want about the topic in question. Tell us things you want to see, tell us things you want us to stop doing, tell us things we're doing right if you want!

Please remain civil in your discussions; we will be watching the post and will step in if things get too heated anywhere. Respect each others' opinions even if you don't agree with them. Anonymous commenting is currently enabled, but will be disabled if abused.


Topics: Questions | Plot | Gameplay | Activity | Miscellaneous

Comments

MISCELLANEOUS

[animusmods]

This is for any topic that doesn't fit into the ones we've provided for you! Please put your topic in your subject. This will let people easily see what you want to discuss!

[thousandcurses]

I am not sure where else this would go, but. Thank you, mods, for being easy to talk to and listening. I've been in a couple of games in the past where you couldn't turn to the mods, and any crit on how they were handling the game even if it was running it into the ground was met with dismissal. So, thanks and stay great.

+1

[attheclocktower]

This this this so much. It's really lovely to have such approachable mods who you know will actually listen to what you're saying.

+1

[cullscuttlefish]

You guys have always been so friendly and approachable, and I really appreciate that. Thank you.

+1

[prayed]

You guys are pretty much the perfect mod team. Never change. ♥

[keybearer]

This has been suggested on the mod contact post, but I would like to bring it here for public discussion.

In any case, with Animus getting bigger, I would like to propose adding another slot per character so that the game would allow one OU and two AUs. Why?

Well, the current system is tricky. While having the two AU slots works for certain characters with little canon, it can result on canon chars being blocked from apping, which happened with Rose Lalonde briefly. By guaranteeing a slot for OU while still allowing the two AUs, you'd open up potential for some fun new character concepts while ensuring that an OU character will always have a chance to app in.

So, yeah. Just curious to see what the playerbase thinks about this.

[animusmods]

This has been something I've debated doing before, actually! My main concern is in how big some of the casts have the potential to get: Homestuck in particular has a massive cast of characters to play from, and was in Animus's past literally half of the game. If I were to add a third slot I would want to start looking at the potential of capping the total size a cast can be as a possible way to counteract this.

pretend this is my Riku account, herp

[risingwinds]

Well, one option could maybe be to have it be a case-by-case thing, perhaps? Like, if a third version wants to app in, a player could ask the existing two players if they're comfortable with it? Though I think it might work best if OUs didn't have to jump through hoops or anything.

Just a thought!

That, and the HS cast hasn't had a tremendously huge explosion just yet. It's big, no doubt, but if it got too out of hand, you could always limit the amount of apps per cycle for casts like that. :|a

[caliginous]

There was a point for a few months where our cast was literally half the game and our Red Dead Virgo cast was larger than our canon cast. It has the potential to happen, we've just been fairly low on the growth scale lately.

I could see the potential for concern and speaking as a hamsteak myself, I could support a canon cap if it starts getting nutty.

I actually think Homestuck is probably one of the only canons that has the potential of having OC block occur due to its sheer popularity, but I could be wrong.

[risingwinds]

Ah, really? I didn't even realize that, but that is a fair point to consider.

I suppose a cap could work if things get too out of control, but where would the limit even be? I think Homestuck is a unique case simply due to the number of main characters, so I wonder if different caps for different canons make sense if that does become a necessity.

[animusmods]

I believe at its height the Homestuck cast had forty members, so my first instinct is to limit it to 30 or 35.

[thousandcurses]

Something mentioned on plurk would be polling the current cast which could easily work... ...If we find a way around the nasty problem of someone vetoing simply because they want that slot to go to a friend. One suggestion to avoid this was having to state a reason for a veto. But that does run into a problem with someone vetoing because they want a friend to app that certain character and otherwise have no problems with that AU otherwise. So it's a tricky thing, it seems. :|a

[egotist]

I think introducing a cast cap would be nice (saying this as somebody who's in a large cast lol). I think if a certain cast got to the point where it was approaching about 30 or so (roughly 1/8 of the total character count) would be a good cap. Of course it should be flexible depending on the current size of the game.

[derping]

Rather than having an overall cap for the size of a cast, maybe there should just be a cap on the percentage of the cast that can have a third slot? Say, for example, there can be no limit on the number of characters who can have a single duplicate, but only half or a third of the characters in a cast can have three versions of a character? There's probably a much better way of organizing a system like that than I can come up with, but that was my first thought as an alternative to an absolute limit on the number of characters per cast.

[warriorscribe]

It could simply be at mod discretion. You guys are fair and reasonable, and there are plenty of moments we could point to to prove that.

[prayed]

I was trying to think of how to add to this while both not blocking an OU slot while still keeping it simple or instating caps, which will still come with the problem of characters being rendered unappable, and it really is a tough one.

The only suggestion I can add to this is to change it back to one OU and AU for a character, but either bar people from playing characters who have too little canon to warrant an OU slot or to simply grant them an OU slot so long as it lines up with what little is presented in canon. Or a combination of the two. I've seen games that accepted and even had seperate apps for canon OCs (for lack of better term,) without accepting AUs.

Of course, this comes with the problem of characters from ongoing series who have the potential to get more development, so...I'm not sure how to handle that. I might be complicating things too much myself too. I'm kind of at a loss.

However, if a third slot is implemented I would wouldn't want to see it be where the cast votes on who can and cannot app though. I think it's wrong to give the cast the choice, only to stipulate what reasons they can use for rejection. I feel that it has the potential to become stressful for both parties and wind up discouraging people from apping or causing more headaches than it's worth in the long run.

[caliginous]

like i mentioned above, i think there's only a handful of casts who would run into the OU blocking problem while also having an abnormally large cast (KH, Homestuck, popular fandoms with numerous characters).

I think adding a canon cap is a reasonable gesture. A soft cap, perhaps, so that if a new player wants to app into the game into a cast that's already capped, perhaps their app can be considered. However, someone already in the game would be prevented from adding to the pool?

Its a thought. I think its the easiest compromise between the two. As fun as having 40 homestuck characters in game was (and everyone was pretty good about tagging out too), I know it gets intimidating.