- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah.
Of course.
It tastes like sheets in the geriatric ward a night after an intense Bingo tournament.
Like old age.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- Tags
- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Of course.
It tastes like sheets in the geriatric ward a night after an intense Bingo tournament.
Like old age.
- Location
- Finland
Some stuff is funny, i genuinely enjoyed the burrito discussion.
Other stuff is less so (i am so bloody tired of all things necromancy and/or Abelheim).
And what is and is not is very reader dependent.
And while individual tangents might last only couple pages, it is still couple pages to read with little relevant stuff, and they can often just be replaced with another set of madness. Or people trying to loophole themselves into ultimate power by asking ever so slightly differently worded questions about possible magic items or spells.
Other stuff is less so (i am so bloody tired of all things necromancy and/or Abelheim).
And what is and is not is very reader dependent.
And while individual tangents might last only couple pages, it is still couple pages to read with little relevant stuff, and they can often just be replaced with another set of madness. Or people trying to loophole themselves into ultimate power by asking ever so slightly differently worded questions about possible magic items or spells.
- Location
- Greece
I read literally everything too, and I find tthose humorous diversions to be a tension breaking enjoyment that keeps the thread from becoming too hostile or businesslike and is enjoyable to boot.
Not disagreeing with you here, each person experiences stuff in a different way and all are valid, just putting my experience here to point out that there are different perspectives that may arise even if one reads everything
Edit: I also would appreciate it if the word "spam" wasn't used here. People often put genuine thought in their humour, even if/when it is low effort, and dismissing those activities as "spam" feels kind of unfair.
Second Edit: the first Edit goes to the thread using that word in general, NOT the poster I replied to using it in particular. My bad.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I am very interested in what the results of doing the expedition with protector on will be. We might actually get more credit for it then we did for K8P with Ranald acting as our hype man.
There's a point where it gets to random chatter though, and it's roughly at number 2 or 3.
i.e. Here. Either at licorice, or discussing whether licorice can be good or not.
Talking about "can you eat powerstones"? Weird, but okay, whatever. I dunno. Random, but.
Advancing to talking about "Is licorice good or bad?" Too far for me. This is no longer even remotely related to warhammer. Just because you played a game of telephone, does not mean any endtopic is related. No more-so than would starting on one wiki page and then wiki-walking a lot, mean that you are still on your related topic (and I mean the "Taft -> wet t-shirt contests" level of wiki-walking. Not the type which is still focused on the original topic. You know what I mean.)
This does not mean that licorice is an awful topic that must never be discussed and you are bad and should feel bad. If licorice had somehow come up independently and directly and immediately from the story itself -- like if licorice were a theorized or actual trade good of Karak Eight Peaks, and the discussion centered around farming and cash crops in Karak Eight Peaks? Then it would have been on topic (sorta, for a little while, at least). Because the discussion would have been about farming and trade in Karak Eight Peaks, which is at least a relevant topic. But it's not. We're talking about licorice because somebody wanted to know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a
Basically, when you get to the XKCD equivalent of "Taft in a wet t-shirt contest", is when I start groaning and going "I wish it didn't come to this. This is actually not-fun for me."
Title text: 'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.
This is called... hrm, actually. Not thread spam per se, but thread inflation, and is bad.
I do not want a gigantic mega-thread that is... mrgh. =/
Well I do. See harm in it, that is. Namely, let's take a look at BeepSmile's quote below, especially.
Because when it's framed like that, I... do not actually like this.
The reaction to being in a mega-thread should not be "Well I guess it doesn't matter if we fill 300 pages with spam!" Also, maybe I do not want a thread that is impossible to make sense of without massive usage of the search function? Like, "but search function" should not be a get-out-of-argument-free card.
I don't want to come to Divided Loyalties to read about Taft in a wet t-shirt contest. I want to read about Divided Loyalties, Mathilde, Warhammer Fantasy, magic, Karak Eight Peaks, Dwarfs, the characters of Divided Loyalties, related plot threads and speculations, maybe connections between Warhammer Fantasy and history or whatever, and so on.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The point is that it's already way too late for that to be on the table.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
With respect, I was using Beepsmiles own descriptor. You can't be annoyed at me for using some one elses terminology about it.
- Location
- Greece
There's a point where it gets to random chatter though, and it's roughly at number 2 or 3.
i.e. Here. Either at licorice, or discussing whether licorice can be good or not.
Talking about "can you eat powerstones"? Weird, but okay, whatever. I dunno. Random, but.
Advancing to talking about "Is licorice good or bad?" Too far for me. This is no longer even remotely related to warhammer. Just because you played a game of telephone, does not mean any endtopic is related. No more-so than would starting on one wiki page and then wiki-walking a lot, mean that you are still on your related topic (and I mean the "Taft -> wet t-shirt contests" level of wiki-walking. Not the type which is still focused on the original topic. You know what I mean.)
This does not mean that licorice is an awful topic that must never be discussed and you are bad and should feel bad. If licorice had somehow come up independently and directly and immediately from the story itself -- like if licorice were a theorized or actual trade good of Karak Eight Peaks, and the discussion centered around farming and cash crops in Karak Eight Peaks? Then it would have been on topic (sorta, for a little while, at least). Because the discussion would have been about farming and trade in Karak Eight Peaks, which is at least a relevant topic. But it's not. We're talking about licorice because somebody wanted to know how many licks it takes to get to the center of atootsie popPowerstone!
Basically, when you get to the XKCD equivalent of "Taft in a wet t-shirt contest", is when I start groaning and going "I wish it didn't come to this. This is actually not-fun for me."
Title text: 'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.
This is called... hrm, actually. Not thread spam per se, but thread inflation, and is bad.
I do not want a gigantic mega-thread that is... mrgh. =/
Well I do. See harm in it, that is. Namely, let's take a look at BeepSmile's quote below, especially.
Because when it's framed like that, I... do not actually like this.
The reaction to being in a mega-thread should not be "Well I guess it doesn't matter if we fill 300 pages with spam!" Also, maybe I do not want a thread that is impossible to make sense of without massive usage of the search function? Like, "but search function" should not be a get-out-of-argument-free card.
I don't want to come to Divided Loyalties to read about Taft in a wet t-shirt contest. I want to read about Divided Loyalties, Mathilde, Warhammer Fantasy, magic, Karak Eight Peaks, Dwarfs, the characters of Divided Loyalties, related plot threads and speculations, maybe connections between Warhammer Fantasy and history or whatever, and so on.
Posts about Taft in a wet Tshirt usually end in 5 posts or less though. And they happen a lot more often and get longer than that in serious discussion, actually, when people start talking about historical examples. Off my head, I remember a quite long and ultimately irrelevant discussion about the construction of a medieval barrel, and that was on a serious topic. Point is, this allways happens in all discussion, thread madness or not, and is a different topic/subject entirelly, plus one that can only be solved by "if you go past point 3 or 4, you get a gentle reminder to get back on topic or take it to DM, followed by an not so gentle one if you persist"
And the length of the thread does matter because, ultimately, vast majority is serious discussion and even serious discussion that repeats the same things. Putting a pinch of salt does not inflate the thread and, for some, provides a necessary function.
Oh, Apologies, I really should hve specified this was a comment on the general thread, not something targeted at any poster (including you). I put that after I realised how often it happened but I didn't want to doublepost, so I amended it to my comment. I really should have thought about it better, it could only be taken the wrong way since it was a word you used also, so I firmly apologise and claim full fault for my miscomunication gaffe.
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Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
While I agree with the sentiment displayed in the post, I would like to point out that necromancy is not a problem on SV. Dogpiling on someone for necromancy is against the rules, but the act of necroing a thread isn't.
I personally really like this compared to other sites.
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
I'm not saying that the fact we need search to find a previous conversation is good. I'm saying that it is.
To me, this a damage done in terms of 'consequences of thread inflation'. And it doesn't get appreciably worse with more inflation, so we might as well enjoy the nice things that happen to cause said inflation.
So: why should one's reaction not be "it's not terribly important if a bunch of pages are filled with conversations that have little that links them to the topic of this thread when said thread is over 7k pages long"?
I'm not arguing for undifferentiated spam in practice mind, just explaining my perspective that in a big thread, once the "search function needed" threshold has been reached, the contents of pages 2300-2600 are not really something we have to be concerned about after those posts have been made.
Frankly I think this comes down to a difference in values. You value things being very on topic (wrt DL) and never off topic, because that's why you're here, and I value the very occasional spiraling out to other aspects of life on occasion, if those spirals are nice and fun - it creates within me a feeling of something more than a cold mechanical analysis with strangers, makes me feel more like there are people behind the words I'm reading. That I learn a little about who they are.
And it's... sad that the occasional foray out from DL related stuff in the name of shared fun (for those that like said forays, of course) is something that you actively dislike. I wish it didn't bother you.
But fuck it. It's 2020 fam, and I'll take my happiness where I can get it, and your dislike of people occasionally branching out to non-DL stuff in the name of being silly means less to me than the pleasure I derive from one of the few things I actually still enjoy.
---
I'm not interested in putting in the mental effort to come up with a solution that isn't "all posts must be linked to DL" that gets you what you want, and that solution is one that I oppose. Because I believe that such a rule will significantly reduce the feeling of community I get from engaging in this thread/playing this quest. If you or anyone else have some good ideas on the other hand; I'd be happy to consider them.
I used the word 'spam' once to describe something that we do not do, as a way to try and communicate my point.
Please do not use my words out of the context that I use them, and then say that I am using those words to describe something that I am not describing with them.
I'll chalk that up to a reading comprehension error, god knows I do enough of them myself.
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NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
There's no realistic solution to this that keeps all parties happy, unfortunately. Some people like the minor derails and natter and thread madness, some people dislike it, and trying to set limits or boundaries is just going to fail. The only way it's going to get resolved one way or the other is if we get BoneyM involved, and that's something I'd rather not do.
... Or you could just keep to the literal normal and expected of threads, stories, quests -- general and usual forum posting -- and remain on topic or at least related to the topic or subject, and not consider them as a personal group chat, and instead use literal chat groups or PMs (or the literal Chat Lounge, or more general-chatting-and-stuff threads specifically for that sort of thing) for that purpose.
I don't think it's wrong to expect or think that threads about a topic, be about that topic, rather than "that topic, and also literally anything else you feel like, it's cool."
Like... Yes, I suppose there's no way to please both "people that want to be on topic" and "people who consider anything goes." That is true. That, uh, that. Um. But that doesn't mean those positions are equivalent and should be considered equally weighed? (Much less feeling like it defaults to "so err on the side of the second.")
I don't think it's wrong to expect or think that threads about a topic, be about that topic, rather than "that topic, and also literally anything else you feel like, it's cool."
Like... Yes, I suppose there's no way to please both "people that want to be on topic" and "people who consider anything goes." That is true. That, uh, that. Um. But that doesn't mean those positions are equivalent and should be considered equally weighed? (Much less feeling like it defaults to "so err on the side of the second.")
FlyingScanian
Tea Addict
- Location
- Land of Eternal Night
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You got one of those right, at least. It keeps the thread active. Which is not necessarily a undiluted good thing, this isn't 4chan, where a thread will die if there hasn't been a post in the last 30 minutes.
It also has an insular effect, where the old guard fool around but new people (or old lurkers, like me) need to make more effort than its worth to contribute, because a post, be it ever so insightsful, will soon be buried behind 5 pages of blabber and white noise. I'd love to be more active here, but half the reason I'm not, is that I don't have the 25-30 hours necessary to keep up with the thread, and do something else in my life (I exaggregate, but not as much as I would want to). Better to just set notifications to "OP only", toss in a vote when applicable, and then ignore.
And the fact that there's threadmarks only helps partially. I still haven't managed to catch up with certain Omake series from when the thread went into total overdrive, because it is still some jumping around to follow individual threads. And that is even assuming that what you're looking for has been threadmarked.
Bbut I guess that's all acceptable sacrifices for allowing the old guard to spam around.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yeah, you are about two years too late- thread culture is pretty well established at this point. Plus, if you can actually start a discussion relevant to what you think we should be talking about and keep it going, more power too you: I've seen a lot of very interesting posts just sink because no one bothered to reply to them, drowned under the tide of lore-book reference discussion and semantics that are 'relevant'.
But as it is, if you can find a topic that has not been picked to death already, I'd like to hear it. We tend to get into thread madness as an alternative to rehashing 'relevant' things for the Nth time, and I much prefer it. Most of our self-improvement and research paths have been gamed out for the next 5-6 steps, potential for spells we could develop is the most recent set of remains on the dissection table, plans for improving the Karak/Empire tend to run into a wall of disinterest from 'not our job' sorts, and efforts to build out the fan-canon for K8P and Ulrikadrin got a lost more pushback than I expected when I brought it up from people who preferred to stick with word of Boney alone.
So. What do you have for us, besides a meta-discussion about thread bloat?
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I'm not the most socially skilled, or clever and on-your-feet-thinking of people, so I can't come up with a handy answer to that. So I guess I'll just default to blunt truth and honesty, even if it doesn't make me (nor you) happy. Namely...
Silence?
Like. Don't post, then. It's not a smart or clever answer of me. But it is straightforward. Maybe just let the thread lie for a bit, then. I mean... That happens to threads sometimes. They don't need to be 100% active all the time. I mean, this thread is uncommonly big and fast-moving, that doesn't mean it has to be the case that it's always moving fast and never sleeps? It wouldn't be the end of the world.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
I think one fundamental disconnect here is that what you see as 'anything goes' isn't seen like that by the people who enjoy the digressions. For me, at least, thread madness isn't just random, whatever, someone pulled-it-out-their-ass topics, it's a silly digression from a thread-related topic. If someone just started randomly talking about chimpanzees doing backflips out of nowhere, I'd completely agree that's a derail. If the thread somehow got to that point from a discussion that's on topic, however, I'd consider that to be fine.
Dismissing it as people wanting to talk about 'that topic, and also literally anything else you feel like, it's cool' is either misunderstanding what people want or just having a fundamentally different opinion of what constitutes a derail.
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Silence? hmm.
That's really not going to happen with the number of people in this thread. You are welcome mute it except for the Boney posts, and check for omake at that point- it's what I do with a few quests I like to read but not participate in. (Runelord here, because I don't have the background, and Heir of the Bruce over on SB.) But requesting a change to a long-term thread norm on the basis that it 'should' be different and expecting people to agree and comply seems a bit... entitled? There are tools for indivuals to customize their experience, but getting the 2-3 dozen frequent posters and hundreds of infrequent to act collectively is very hard even for Boney.
That's really not going to happen with the number of people in this thread. You are welcome mute it except for the Boney posts, and check for omake at that point- it's what I do with a few quests I like to read but not participate in. (Runelord here, because I don't have the background, and Heir of the Bruce over on SB.) But requesting a change to a long-term thread norm on the basis that it 'should' be different and expecting people to agree and comply seems a bit... entitled? There are tools for indivuals to customize their experience, but getting the 2-3 dozen frequent posters and hundreds of infrequent to act collectively is very hard even for Boney.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
The problem is that "related to the topic of the thread" is a very vague and undefined concept. "What does powerstones taste like" is technically a question related to Warhammer (and by extension Divided Loyalties) lore, so what defines when the questioning goes too far "off"?
There were also literally just three posts related to licorice in general, all of which were jokes, so if that's the cutoff for when something counts as a derail we're gonna need a lot of heavy policing.
To be fair, "this is what the thread culture is like now" is not an argument for "this is how the thread culture should be". If someone has a problem with how the thread works, they should bring it up, otherwise things never get fixed.
Maybe more just an exaggerated frustration expression. Plus a result of BeepSmile's posts being one of the first responses to me posts, and the views expressed there.
EDIT:
Yes, thank you.
Because, what, is my only recourse supposed to be "Well, just don't complain or post, then"? I already spend most of my time in lurking mode anyway. =/
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- Location
- Space
The thing is the normal and expected behavior in any thread is that you're generally expected to stay on topic but short digressions into areas linked to the current ongoing discussion are allowed as long as they aren't excessive. Admittedly, this thread's scale means that what constitutes excess is both a bit unclear and larger than what you'd see elsewhere, but restricting the thread to a similar absolute quantity of off topic stuff to what any other thread puts out would require much stronger limitations on how far any individual poster is allowed to go off topic than they would have to follow in other threads.
- Location
- Greece
Dude, no one said "literally anything goes". The split is between "people who want to be all serious and bussineslike" and "people who like humorous diversions that are related to the subject" . Off topic is, as I mentioned before, literally a different subject and one that frequently happens on serious discussion as well
I have never actually seen any serious post be buried by humour? More often than not, it seems to me like it is buried when the discussion is more serious and heated and goes 10 miles per hour. I may be wrong here, and your point is valid, its just not something that I have ever seen happening.
Also, I think that it would be more accurate to say that the division is between more and less involved players, cuz I, at lest. am not actually old guard by any extend. (caught up somewhere in the mid 5000s, I think). And while it is fair to say that this kind of activity is unfair to those that have better things to do than sink their time here, I think, again, that serious topics are a bigger stonewall than one off diversions that do not really matter on the votes anyway. It is serious post of repeated points that result is a ton of pages when a new post is posted, and serious posts that inflate stuff.
I also think that it is a fact of life that, fair or not, enjoyment and mastery one gains on the involvement with a non purely passive hobby correlates directly with time spent (often there is a cap). That would be true even if we made the thread fully serious. It is not elitism, it is an unfortunate side effect of communal involvement based media, and the reason why multiple tiers of interaction always form naturally around them. See also: any ARGs for a more extreme example and proof that it is an unfortunate reality based on this kind of media and not something that results from people trying to make stuff more fun
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
At least this thread isn't like a Vampire LARP or some such where you gain power from having been there longer. I quit both a Vampire and a Dystopia Rising game after realizing there was an actual 'you will never be as good as this person' mechanic in play.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
That makes more sense, though it honestly wasn't clear to me that you were expressing frustration over being overly prescriptive. Sorry.
To be clear, I'm not saying that your enjoyment doesn't matter, or that your views shouldn't be expressed, or anything daft like that. It's just that while what you want going through will make you and other people of a similar opinion happier, at the same time it'll negatively impact the enjoyment of quite a lot of other people.
Because of that I simply don't think there's any good solution here, any answer that will make everybody happy. People just have fundamentally different views on what's enjoyable, and on what counts as a derail.
- Location
- Greece
May I say that, while I am one of the people that disagree with @Garlak , extremely so, an argument for neutrality is inheretly one that benefits the status quo, and when the status quo is thread madness with some regularity, then an argument for neutrality would be inherently an argument against Garlak's position.
So they are right to disagree, and I say that knowing it harms my own position.
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- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I concur with this. For my own part, I don't particularly enjoy the thread staying buzzing at a rate of several pages a day despite nothing happening and there being no updates. So I just stay quiet: despite being one of the most active posters in this thread in general, you may have noticed that over the last week I've posted a couple of times a day at the most, and not at all on several days. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is an idea I find very important.
That said, I am lucky enough to have other social outlets, including people I can talk to in real life about this quest if I feel the urge. Especially in this year of all years, I can't really find it in my heart to begrudge people being hype about a thing they care about and for which there aren't many outlets -- people have mentioned Discord, but this quest has no official Discord (by the QM's express wishes) and while there's a bit of scattered discussion in various other quest Discords (since there's a lot of crossover), that isn't quite the same.
Everything is tradeoffs.
One of the motivating factors behind my attributing each turn plan to the planmaker in my summary post the other week was specifically to illustrate the degree to which your statement about this thread is true. A couple of names pop up fairly often (my own being one of them), but a lot of people, including people fairly new to the thread, get their turn plans (or variants) adopted and voted for, which, as someone whose constant refrain is "increase democracy you cowards," I find very pleasing.