[Evalina]

@Vanashis I think one important thing to note is that operations’ difficulty was set by players.

I never had issues winning low difficulty operations even with just 2 or 3 people.

The legion scales, but does so with such aggression… Right now the only way to win most of them is to keep the legion busy while someone else fulfills the objective, and even that fails much of the time. I don’t think that’s per-se a negative thing, it certainly makes the objective actually relevant opposed to past iterations where it was often done after the operation was already won.

I think adding a bit more soldiers would probably be a good thing. Or even returning a simpler / less busted version of manpower (just give every society 5 per week or so capping at 15, substract 2 per borough they own, done) and letting societies themselves pick which raids they consider worth spending these on.

[Evalina]

Honestly I don’t know context or whatever roleplay happened here, I am just a bit shocked by the callousness on display in this thread.

The reason not to kill a character nilly-willy isn’t because they cost karma or whatever. It’s because people invest time and effort into stories and generally it’s best to either engage positively or not at all. Death can be a good end to a story and part of an arc for another, but death for the sake of death just takes away from the game and adds nothing.

I am not sure why anyone would be so eager to kill. If it’s because they were in your view bad then just call that out, (as @lykaia did, thank you!) but I struggle to see why anyone would read this thread, read how people think about lieutenants and pking, and consider spending hours to days to weeks to months of their precious time trying to create a compelling lieutenant while the attitudes are what they are.

They’re meant to be rabble rousers and impress how bad the 63rd is. I think making the leap from ‘They’re meant to be really evil!’ to ‘So we should kill them!’ sure is consistent but boy is it unfun. The game flies, lives and dies, by its villains. Something this game, I would argue, has been sorely lacking in recent iterations. Surely we can have enough consideration to not normalize murdering the few people who choose to do so – a lieutenant (a good one) is effort just like a normal player is. And sure the barrier to murdering them should be lower. But I think the game would still be a lot better if we’d kept in mind ‘hey, we could really use some good lieutenants to make the 63rd more than a piece of text that means we lost favor, let’s encourage or at least not pee in the cheerios of whomever is giving that a shot’.

I think expecting them to be clique tools is assuming the worst. I certainly hope we’ll have the good faith to play lieutenants for the purpose of impressing the big bad legion, and engaging with them in a way that keeps a ball rolling, whilst they might fill in roles needed by the playerbase (e.g. fleshformer lieutenants) without serving specific pcs / ooc friends.

But good faith starts on both sides. Maybe Athena did something to earn themselves a bit of bad faith, maybe not. I don’t know. But I find this general discussion horrifyingly inconsiderate of antagonists.

And yeah, doing 0 RP on a kill is just… At least bring in others so they have a story about it, ideally. Publicly execute someone by hanging citing the legion’s crimes if you’re a bit evil. You know? There’s a lot of potential fun here and instead a character is just cast into the void, all the cost none of the benefit. I don’t think that’s very fun for anyone…

[Evalina]

???

They are roleplay generators, antagonists. We’re incentivised to kill monster guests but certainly the polite thing is to let them do some story if they’re trying that.

I don’t know what your source is on their existence spawning NPC Lt’s but that’s not in any helpfile I know of (?) and sounds unlikely anyway unless Nova intends for us to PK every last Lieutenant on the grid at all times. Which would ruin the point.

Speaking of ruining the point.

This sounds bizarre to me? Why would anyone put effort in telling story and creating compelling villains if you’ll deem them ‘kill targets’ and get rid of their effort ASAP with no thought or care about whatever they may be planning. Which presumably would have been RP, perhaps even fun. These guests exist to be villains – villains don’t generally exist to just be shot, but to tell a story with arcs and drive through it other people’s story and world. If it was just about murder then I implore you to look at the wonderful commands lieutenants have and the way they can completely ruin your day using them. They do not, in fact, need to fight you in the mist (or anywhere) to stomp you if they feel like it.

Sorry, I really hope there’s some context here, because if we’re just deleting people because ‘Well we’re supposed to’ then that’s a serious WTF to me. Like, consider your fellow players, even a monster does put effort in their monster. There’s a reason we usually let them show that effort and talk a bit, when possible… And lieutenant guests aren’t monsters. They’re evil yes, but evil like the Hand is evil, just, slightly more so. Are we going to PK T5s too once they get on the grid?

[Evalina]

I don’t know the situation but it stands out as strange to me that killing seems to be the goal here and roleplay the optional sidequest. I presume there’s more to this unsuitable for this forum that makes this discussion maybe hard to have (?)

[Evalina]

Game has a memory leak -> uses too much memory -> server runs out of memory -> everything else on the server stops working.

The whole game + forums + old forums are all hosted on the same physical machine I am pretty sure, so this happens.

[Evalina]

I figure this might be handy until Nova gets time to respond, this is from a note he did in H6:

There seems to be some confusion around hypnotise amensia. This ability lets you make someone
remember an event as if it happened in a dream, that’s it. It doesn’t allow you to target something
more than an event, and it doesn’t stop the person from figuring out that the ability was used on
them. This is a basic ability used to help cover up the supernatural, it has next to no utility on
the supernaturally aware who know that it exists since they will reasonably conclude if they had a
dream of you beating them up and they have bruises the next day that you beat them up and used it on
them. Memory potions can be used to meaningfully remove memories but even these will usually fail
after a few days on T2s and higher. There is deliberately no way in the game to meaningfully remove
memories long term from more important characters with sanc.

[Evalina]

As mentioned, bargain is intended for people who want higher invitation. It would not surprise me if beyond rising invitation, it also made it easier to gain invitation, for that reason. Not saying how that works, but you know, Nova works in mysterious ways and using system x for its purpose may lead to its purpose happening in sometimes unexpected ways.

Obviously only Nova can answer this with fact, but I would /strongly/ recommend to stick to bargain purity while trying to keep invitation down under duress.

[Evalina]

These issues came into play weeks after the first podcast, so going to have to put the nix on that theory. It’s unlikely Nova is running the model on the same server anyway, even if he does run the model himself. A server used to run models like this ideally has a GPU, Haven needs no such thing and adding even a basic GPU adds far, far more to the pricing than doing the minor things haven does via the API I think.

I think about 8000~ emotes written by the AI would be the likely point where it’d be profitable to run a GPU there. More likely Nova is using an external API (and we know, from past things, he’s used at least Gemini and probably also others, so hey) and very perhaps a server shared with a more constant cloud workload. Unless you all are rping with the AI a /lot/, it just doesn’t make sense.

Processing 1 player’s logs takes about 30 seconds to a minute at worst and isn’t that heavy for gemini. I let it process all of mine a few times to test some things. We’ve about 700 players if we’re being generous. That’s 12 hours per week. And that’s being incredibly safe for us – it’s probably way way less.

Presuming he’s being clever and using batch processing on multiple players at once and limiting the total RP processed per player to a reasonable limit he’s probably paying about 20 cents per active player. If he’s processing all our RP, he’s paying a lot more. But a local model that can reasonably handle that at a decent level of quality will probably cost him a ton more money. Because he still wouldnt need that GPU 24/7. He’d need it at most a few processing hours a day. The rest of the time it’s just costing him money. And plenty of us donate, but that doesn’t mean he’s likely to throw that away so easily.

If he’s using the podcast service I think he is, he’s paying about 22$ for that. Gemini can create the entire script in minutes – no need for any constant real time processing that would cause this.

I suspect he just did an oopsie in some of the code he wrote to handle petitions a week ago and is hitting a resource limit. We had 2 manual copyovers since, so I suspect he’s aware of that oopsie and maybe already fixed it.

Who knows, pure speculation that. Just wanted to counter-argue blame-the-llm before that becomes a widespread thing…

[Evalina]

Going by the old code:
There’s a penalty to your benefit to vampires if you were drained. Supers give significantly less than non-supers. There’s a penalty if the biter is also the last biter. Benefit for virgins that only counts if they weren’t the last biter. The amount of LF thevictim has matters. Higher tiers provide more blood potentially. Being bitten twice in about a day of time will lead to the vampire being punished instead of rewarded for biting.

Not 2 weeks unless things drastically changed – that would be weird, there’s nowhere near enough fun bite targets for vampires if each has to have a 2 week cool down.

Only Nova can truly elaborate, but I hope this helps for now.

[Evalina]

No real stake in this but would like to strongly disagree with it being bad form to use invitation’s more magical abilities as a natural without arcane knowledge.

If Nova didn’t want us doing that, it would be /trivially/ easy for him to add a check for it. And you can absolutely suggest doing so.

I would say as a natural non-sensitive, you’re free to RP invitation in various ways that make sense for your char. if you like, you’re unable to use it. But also, you’re free to just, have one of your contacts hack on your behalf and give it to you. Have some creature you’ve a pact with aid you. Have an eidolon from your cult aid you. Have a magical tool you’re using for it. Have literally knowledge of nothing else but know that.

invitation is a tool to enable antag, any tool that is enabled for you this way, in New Haven, is a tool you are allowed to use and roleplay being able to use in whatever way is defined (in this case, none specifically) or whatever makes sense for your character. It’s the flipside of the coin where, no matter how cool you think it is, you’re not allowed to RP abilities you don’t mechanically / lorewise have.

I’d take it all fairly loosely. Figure it out with a handwaive. Leave the limiting to Nova, not each other.

[Evalina]

Naturals *might* be able to get the Sorcery Legendaries at least, not sure about others.

From what I recall of H6 code, Sorcery doesn’t require being a supernatural. It merely requires the appropriate level of the arcane tree related, which I think requires being gifted.

[Evalina]

View post on imgur.com

Posted it before and failed so trying again. Same disclaimer applies.
Warning, AI generated. The first one I generated just for you people since many of you dislike the anime aesthetic. The rest are anime aesthetic since I generally assemble outfits by mixing and matching items and an anime-based generation tool has been my best experience with getting it to generate exactly what I want. The others are a tad too random for my workflow. So don’t click beyond the first if that bothers you!

[Evalina]

The trick was using ‘share’ to get a direct album link and then post that, not the embed blockquote, for anyone else who wondered.

[Evalina]

<script async src=”//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Warning, AI generated. The first one I generated just for you people since many of you dislike the anime aesthetic. The rest are anime aesthetic since I generally assemble outfits by mixing and matching items and an anime-based generation tool has been my best experience with getting it to generate exactly what I want. The others are a tad too random for my workflow. So don’t click beyond the first if that bothers you!

[Evalina]

So what?

If you’d have engaged in good faith, maybe yes, we would have betrayed your trust. But you know, everyone watching would tell that we’re jerks and would be on your side if that actually backfires in an unfun way.

But by engaging expecting bad faith, you essentially created a bad experience, and by giving us an unfun experience that we didn’t sign up for, you risk retaliation of an unhealthy and unfun nature. There’s a chance of course we later find you and decide to actually try to entertain you anyway because we’re nice or interested in you or w/e. But that chance would be much higher if we had fun.

You can’t expect us to react in good faith and a fun way when you’re presuming misbehavior and so acting in bad faith. Obviously once you set a precedent that antag by you means instant combat, well, you can’t blame us if we instantly get you ganked every time you approach, or pre-emptively attack you next full moon to ensure it doesn’t happen again, right? Would you enjoy that? Most of us – certainly the people I like to RP with – instead turn the other cheek and try to focus on the good instead. But it’s totally fair not to.

And why, even? If you really don’t trust us to be fun there, just… Don’t? Go antagonize people you expect will be fun to antagonize. I struggle to conceive what could have been fun for you in breaking into some casual RP, beating people up and leaving. It’s not an RDM, no, but it’s also not a TDM. It’s a collaborative roleplaying game. And yes, you can play that distrustfully and look out for number one, but that’s not fun for anyone and I question the point of doing that in a game where people are liable to kill you for it.

I think you’re a good guy Luka, but good roleplay requires good faith from both ends. The only end you control is you, and it takes one to get the ball rolling. And losing isn’t so bad, it’s a fantastic way, in fact, to learn who is and isn’t fun to lose to. Usually these are the same people who are fun to beat later.

Like, this chat isn’t people going, oh luka is terrible I hate luka let’s pk luka it’s okay if it’s luka. It’s people going, I had x bad experience here, so I am responding in x way. I don’t actually agree with the notion you’ve to RP back if you’re not enjoying it – you really do not. You owe nobody RP in this game. But you know, if someone feels they have to kill you to get you to get lost from them, something has gone very wrong.

I promise people aren’t hoping for you to get in more trouble and quit or anything, they’re hoping you learn, get better so they can have a better experience with you. You don’t come across like an ass, so it just feels like a waste. I’d love to have fun with you in a healthy way, and I think most feel that way. And anyone who does keep a grudge and come at your throat if you’re interacting in good faith and taking in feedback and trying to be the best werewoof you can be, disengaging from anti-fun, well, there’ll still be an ass then, it just won’t be you.

[Author]

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