Remove ads

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Reader mode
Velorien said:
Having spent hours talking it over with @eaglejarl (in parallel to the hours spent talking it over in-thread), we've decided that the case for retconning the update is very slightly stronger than the case for keeping it (props to @Restinan for clarity of argument).

The update is no longer canon.

However, this was an act of vast stupidity which was enabled by the majority's failure to vote, and the case for retconning it is uncomfortably slim. Vote early, often and sensibly so that this kind of clusterfuck misunderstanding does not happen again.

I'm not going to write the previous winning plan because at this point I do not have the time, but expect something up tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Thank you, Velorien. I know that I, for one, will be taking this lesson to heart.
 
So I misses the entire "incident", which is probably all the better for my mental health. I'd like to point toward proposed rule addendum a couple pages back:

schlega said:
@eaglejarl, @Velorien
I thought the update was handled fairly and respect your decisions about the rules. I would like to be allowed to vote on a change to the rules that would prevent things like this in the future. Something like

[]Voting Plan: Anti-Meme Defense
If an action plan takes the lead just before the voting deadline and a sufficient number of voters for that plan immediately express regret that the plan actually won, the winning plan is merged with the one it overtook. If the plans are not compatible, the winning plan is referenced as a fleeting thought that passes through Hazou's mind before following the second place plan.

[] Voting Plan: Omakefication
If a joke plan wins, the resulting update is a non canon omake.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Velorien subscribe to his newsletter, so you know it's good.

[x] Voting Plan: Omakefication

I believe further discussion is neccesary to ensue this doesn't become a Get-out-of-Jail free card. Beyond that, I'd like to expresses my appreciation for the regulars and QMs of this thread for creating a wonderful narrative for readers such as myself to enjoy. Y'all had a healthy community which would only grows stronger from this.

Edit: Also, my law education compels me to loudly yells "Fuck yeah, judicial precedent!!" Erm, I appreciate the difficulty inherent in choosing one principle at the expense of another though, so kudos.
 
Last edited:
Velorien said:
Having spent hours talking it over with @eaglejarl (in parallel to the hours spent talking it over in-thread), we've decided that the case for retconning the update is very slightly stronger than the case for keeping it (props to @Restinan for clarity of argument).

The update is no longer canon.

However, this was an act of vast stupidity which was enabled by the majority's failure to vote, and the case for retconning it is uncomfortably slim. Vote early, often and sensibly so that this kind of clusterfuck misunderstanding does not happen again.

I'm not going to write the previous winning plan because at this point I do not have the time, but expect something up tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


Thank you. For listening to the playerbase. For engaging with us when many wouldn't have. The fact that you actually honestly engage with your playerbase is something a lot of us seem to take for granted, but you guys are really good at this. Honestly, this was handled better than basically any shitstorm I've ever seen, so congratulations on that, I guess? Sort of a strange thing to be the best at, handling shitstorms, but I guess it's your burden to bear.

TheOtherSandman said:
[X] Action Plan: Buy a YOUTHSUIT
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

NO
 
Last edited:
@Velorien, @eaglejarl, thank you very much for revoking the update.

I know that one reason I don't vote as often as I ought to is a kind of "decision paralysis": it's hard to keep track of what plans are out there and what state they are in, so it's not always clear what to vote for, especially if one isn't available in the relatively short window between the major plans having been finalized and the voting deadline. With posting as rapid as it is in this thread, just figuring out which posts have the official plans can be a pain.

So, a proposal for those of us who can only look in sometimes: an option to vote against a proposal. The rules are as follows:
  1. "[/] Proposal" registers a vote against a proposal, and "[/] @User" signifies voting against whatever @User had voted for.
  2. An against vote subtracts 1 from the vote count of the target proposal or from all proposals voted for by the targeted user.
  3. One can vote against as many proposals or users as one likes. However, a given voter can only decrement a particular proposal's count by 1 at most. For example, if @UserA and @UserB both vote
    [х] Proposal1
    and @UserC votes
    [/] @UserA
    [/] @UserB
    then Proposal1 receives only one against vote as a result. (If @UserD votes the same way, it would receive two, etc.)
  4. One can cancel an against vote by subsequently posting, say "[\] Proposal" or some other unused character.
  5. Finally, if the voter ever votes for a proposal, all their against votes in that round no longer count at all.
From the Approval Voting point of view, an against vote is mathematically equivalent to "approving" everything but the targeted proposals.

The [/] @User mechanic also has the benefit of putting the targeted user "on notice" that other people are taking their joke vote seriously, which might help rein in a bandwagon of frivolous votes like the one that just happened. I am a bit concerned that it could be used as a tool of harassment, however. If this is trialed, we'll see. On the other hand, on some level, dogpiling frivolous voters with @ alerts could help enforce the norm of serious votes only.

It might allow lurkers who notice something weird going on to pop in and help the situation without necessarily knowing what the other voting options might be.

For example, even if I don't consider myself well enough informed to propose or select a plan, I know that I don't want Armageddon or for the Lovecraft vote to be taken seriously, so in response to these posts,
Citrus said:
[X] Armageddon Initiative
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Dark as Silver said:
[X] Summon Shub-Niggurath Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
[/] Armageddon Initiative
[/] Summon Shub-Niggurath Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young
or, alternatively,
[/] @Citrus
[/] @Dark as Silver

(To the users in question: I don't want to pick on you, but haven't we learned anything?)

Edit: Also,
[/] Action Plan: Buy a YOUTHSUIT
Edit 2: Putting an asterisk in square brackets has special meaning for BBCode, so I changed the proposed symbol to [\].
Edit 3: Some rephrasing and rearranging for coherence.
Edit 4: Another question, this one for @eaglejarl, is how hard would this be to implement in the bot.
 
Last edited:
A comment about today's discussion:

Everyone in this thread owes major thanks to the small number of people who made calm, reasoned, eloquent arguments for why we should change this thing that you all hated.

I also feel that almost everyone in this thread owes me and @Velorien an apology. In addition to the handful of people making reasoned arguments there were a handful of people who either came out in support of how the GMs handled this update or just took things calmly and started looking to move forward. Way too many people, however, took the opportunity to behave in ways that can only be described as rude, insulting, or outright bratty and they were not criticized for it. Much of the rudeness was directed at us personally, such as accusing us of deliberately twisting your vote into the worst possible interpretation.

Let's be straight here, people: Velorien and I do not owe the thread a damn thing. We are doing this because we love it, because we love the community that has grown up here, and because we love engaging with a group of smart, creative people. We are basically working an unpaid part-time job writing this quest. We lose one day a week to writing the updates, and cumulatively about another day over the course of the week in keeping up with the thread, doing mechanics, worldbuilding, planning, etc. What we get for this is an occasional "well written!" or "this is a great quest!" and the satisfaction of seeing a lot of engagement with something we wrote. To have people read a quarter million words of free entertainment that we've spent this much time and effort creating, yet still cop this kind of attitude? Yeah, that was pretty hard.

It's over now. The thing you were all so enraged about is no longer canon and tomorrow Velorien will put up something to replace it. May I suggest that, no matter what is in that update, it would be a good idea for the response to be calm, measured, and oriented towards the productive?
 
Last edited:
Another idea for preventing last minute votes causing the winning plan to be against the majority of voters' wishes is to have a (say) 4 hr period which a plan needs to be in the lead. i.e. eaglejarl's bot would post saying thay Plan X is leading and will win if it maintains the lead for four hours continuously. otherwise the deadline is extended whenever a different plan takes the lead to be four hours from that point of time.

[Jk] Plan Youth never dies: OliWhail's plan plus buy a youthsuit


Too soon? Its probably too soon.
 
eaglejarl said:
A comment about today's discussion:

Everyone in this thread owes major thanks to the small number of people who made calm, reasoned, eloquent arguments for why we should change this thing that you all hated.

I also feel that almost everyone in this thread owes me and @Velorien an apology. In addition to the handful of people making reasoned arguments there were a handful of people who either came out in support of how the GMs handled this update or just took things calmly and started looking to move forward. Way too many people, however, took the opportunity to behave in ways that can only be described as rude, insulting, or outright bratty and they were not criticized for it. Much of the rudeness was directed at us personally, such as accusing us of deliberately twisting your vote into the worst possible interpretation.

Let's be straight here, people: Velorien and I do not owe the thread a damn thing. We are doing this because we love it, because we love the community that has grown up here, and because we love engaging with a group of smart, creative people. We are basically working an unpaid part-time job writing this quest. We lose one day a week to writing the updates, and cumulatively about another day over the course of the week in keeping up with the thread, doing mechanics, worldbuilding, planning, etc. What we get for this is an occasional "well written!" or "this is a great quest!" and the satisfaction of seeing a lot of engagement with something we wrote. To have people read a quarter million words of free entertainment that we've spent this much time and effort creating, yet still cop this kind of attitude? Yeah, that was pretty hard.

It's over now. The thing you were all so enraged about is no longer canon and tomorrow Velorien will put up something to replace it. May I suggest that, no matter what is in that update, it would be a good idea for the response to be calm, measured, and oriented towards the productive?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Thank you both so much, both in specific for making this particular decision, but also in general for being willing to sift through all these posts and extract the actionable, critical feedback from it. And yes, apologies for my own post being needlessly simplistic and nowhere near charitable enough. Please take it as the strongest compliment to the world you have created that so many people are reacting to this so emotionally. It is only because we're so attached to the characters that people get angry and unreasonable.
 
I've largely been lurking until now.

I love the story, and while as nail-biting as this situation was/is I'm like the way it played out. This was a perfectly reasonable way to resolve a vote that caused a sudden shift in personality.

I'm sorry this turned into such I mess for you guys. Be glad it's over, we can move on.

In future. I wonder how the rest of the team will react to learning hazou has a severe mental... thing.

Edit: damn rendered irrelevant by retcon
 
Last edited:
Note: I can't really bring myself read the update yet, even if it is apparently not canon anymore. I'm assuming that @Velorien did his level best to interpret the plan like he usually does with very little to work with. (There's a reason why we have Goals, Methods, and Contigencies separated in our usual plan format. Communication is hard.)


That being said, I'm disappointed that the update is not canon anymore.

Consequences are what makes a quest work, and if the player base can't own up to them, there's not much quest left. You can invent all kinds of justifications how the update doesn't follow the plan, and you can do this for pretty much any update. But the thing is that there's always noise in communications, and if we didn't take it into account in our planning the the results are our fault.

I complain and rant about things that happen in the quest all the time, but I don't think I have ever suggested that we retcon or change the update after it hits. To me, that's part of the contract we have going on in the quest. The QMs build a world, we try to interpret that and then we throw conclusions and actions to QMs and they work as our reality checkers and produce results. Messing with that is really dangerous since it since it lowers the stakes and does horrible things to immersion.

Like I said before the update hit, I don't want bad things to happen to Hazou, but I also don't want bad plans to not have bad consequences.


@eaglejarl @Velorien If you genuinely feel that the update you made is what logically follows from the plan we put forth, you should keep it. Especially if people are trying to force your hand by threatening to quit the quest.

Personally, I won't be going anywhere.
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top