Ignacius

Ironically, Square's already had better ideas themselves (not that they'd remember, the dumbasses). A few incredible advancements in gear/stats/grind they've come up with and then completely forgotten... 1. Vagrant Story - The game where you didn't get weapons, you got parts. Combining different parts created different weapons with different ranges, damages, and damage types. Essentially, you get a part, but that doesn't mean you've gotten Min-Max sword A, you could use it to make all manner of other weapons. Then mix and match. 2. Final Fantasy VII - Materia. Our materia system is a joke compared to what we had in FFVII. Essentially, Square could have completely eliminated the class system with materia. Remember back in the day (just in case anyone here hasn't played FFVII... it's marginally possible) that materia wasn't just an add-on, it was a complex system by which you could increase or decrease weapon damage, equip spells, and alter stats and abilities. Essentially, while FFXIV's materia system is a sort of WoW-style gem system, the slot arrangement was a lot more important in FFVII. And you had to level the materia up to get the better effects out of some. It was awesome having a discussion about the best party/materia setup and what spells you stick that important All materia on. And who had Ultima. And KotR. Imagine if Square installed that as a gear/class mechanic in an MMORPG instead of copying other games. Bushido Blade - Probably less well known (and not technically developed by Square, though I still count it), but a fighting game with the cleanest UI I've ever seen. Nothing on screen except the fighters, you select a character and a weapon and you end up somewhere in an explorable castle against another character and weapon. How no health bar, charge bars, or other stats? Because any strike to one leg would drop you to one knee, limiting your mobility and often your attack variety. Get hit in the other, any you were crawling or rolling. Get hit in the offhand, and you were fielding the weapon one-handed, which was okay for one-handed weapons like a rapier but was horrible fielding something heavy like a hammer or naginata. Get hit once, anytime, in the head, torso, or sword arm and you died. That was completely unforgiving. Being disabled sucked, but even if you disabled someone completely, every enemy was a threat. That might be hard in the real world with lag online, but if all the computers timed individually, you might be able to get away with something like that. Nowadays, you could calculate speed vs. ability to glance blows with armor, something that really happens. I'd say the best way to have a vibrant, thriving economy in a game is to make sure that, instead of making gear more temporary, make it more upgradable and more dependent on upkeep. Imagine applying a system above, particularly Vagrant Story weapon construction and FFVII Materia slotting, to an MMORPG gear system. You may change weapons once in a blue moon to experiment with new range, damage type, or skills, but you can easily hot-swap in and out pieces, spells, et cetera that changes the weapon. The best part about that is, parts and materia you'd gather at the beginning of the game, like All or Weapon Empower, would still be just as useful later in the game, and thus you might still be buying, selling, and servicing things a level 1 crafter could do even in the endgame. At present, it's just working a certain metal until that's completely outmoded, and gear is so bountiful in so many games (as the main reward from quests, dungeons, PVP, and so on) that it's not even necessary to buy it. I'd say the best way to REALLY keep an economy fired up wouldn't be the EVE way, but to really make people fine-tune their weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and so on to suit themselves specifically. Sort of the Diablo 3 method of customization, just throw so many spells, modifications of those spells, and passives at people that they're never bored, they're all trying different combinations of things just to see what works for them. Blazing Corpse spiders > Ghost Firebomb, IMO.

I meant more that the cost/benefit analysis in game company's heads isn't going to pan out for us at this particular moment. I used to love the Park district in Stormwind in WoW because that's what it was. Just a bunch of buildings based on the templates for an inn and a couple shops. That place was RP central. I was a bouncer twice a week at an inn in the Park for a year on Thorium Brotherhood. And we actually made money doing it! I got paid 50 gold a night back when 50 gold was worth something. The Cataclysm destroyed the Park. It was a great idea though. God only knows why Blizz felt the need to get rid of it. Maybe it was the feeling that they'd have to either provide those areas in all major cities or get rid of Stormwind's, and RPers just aren't a big enough chunk of the playerbase. As far as games go, though, there's a difference between having a few enterable buildings (as there have been) and having EVERY building in a massive city be enterable and often have something in it. It'd be great to have if we could afford it in terms of system resources, but the reason we don't have many games like that is that there's not much payoff in terms of gameplay that you don't get out of creating a mass and bump mapping a few doors in. I can think of a few, though. You could get a Fable/Assassin's Creed thing going on where the people who work in shops need somewhere to live and often their families stay home. You could break into those buildings and steal from them or even perhaps purchase property (although hard-coding the livable spaces in a city might be a bit counterproductive at a point when the lack of player housing is becoming a relatively major issue even for non-RPers). Another issue might be that most buildings in a major city aren't residences and aren't entertaining, they're just boring. A populated building in your city might be a local office park. While IT consultants are an important part of any city and you'll find their office spaces in a great many buildings, in the game world, what buildings will see frequent use? Weapons, armor, et cetera. We don't need a great variety of food choices, but (speaking as a man living in Columbus, OH) probably 1/4 of all the places I see on the roadside are restaurants. Carson St. in my birth city of Pittsburgh is the most amazing place in town, seriously just block after block of knocked out bars. There can be times where you might need those things, though. I could think of a way to have shifting stock float around so that when you go shopping, you get, say, all the "auction house" items in shops and have to literally shop around for good deals. You wouldn't know where they were. Or, you could have a game with a lot more going on in it. Or you could also give players supply quotas from those places, meaning you could be getting your "quests" from those stores and thus it would be better to have them exist. Mimicking a real supply chain, in a way. In the end, I think you'd definitely see that more except for one major problem: MMORPGs, so far, have been very country-centric. In essence, town is a safe place to get gear and relax before you go back into the "game-world", meaning outside town. Real towns at the scale you're talking aren't meant to be stopping stations, they're meant to be lived in, worked in, and relaxed in. I think you'd get a lot more mileage out of cities that size if they were more the setting rather than a stopping shop. We're thinking like Midgard or New Seattle size metroplexes where having every building be habitable and useful would be a distinct advantage. Which, in the end, doesn't sound like a bad idea. I'd love to see the game where city is setting. Any MMOs like that around or are they all doing the windswept vista thing?

That might be due to the rather limited scope of games as it relates to cities. I mean, we want huge cities that feel like they live and breathe, but we don't necessarily need them. I mean, what exactly do we need buildings for? We don't actually need to represent the dwelling of every person that lives and works in the town (though that would be awesome in an MMO, a la Fable, for everyone to have to go to bed, lock up shop, and hope the guards stop you from robbing the place). Outside of that, we don't often need legal representation or to visit a government sewage office. I can think of a game that would and could need that, but even I'm thinking that's outside the scope of today's probability, to need to break into the sewage treatment offices to steal plans or plant bugs in order to access the sewers for another break-in later.

Discussion of RP methodology and personal preferences aside, I think all of us who have been doing this for any length of time have had people bleed OOC into IC or vice versa with disastrous results. I know I personally did it once when I was fifteen, and I nearly blew up a forum RP. Luckily, I had people around who were understanding and explained the difference. Some people either aren't lucky enough to have those people around or are too ignorant to listen to them, and we end up with people suddenly disliking all the characters of a player who's character screwed someone else's over. Or the worst is the romantic RP that totally crosses the line and isn't reciprocated IRL. That's sort of the RP horror story, the "girlfriend" that isn't a girlfriend that just won't go away, IC or OOC. I could relate some of those horror stories if no one else here feels like it. Suffice it to say, bleeders are land mines in the RP world, people that seem like normal roleplayers until something happens and they destroy everything around them. If there's one thing to take away from this thread, you can empathize with your character, as that's a methodology choice. Eventually, though, you empathize too closely, so it's important to know not to do that and make that character's life your own life. Bad and good things happen to characters that are NOT happening to you personally; it's all RP. If it bleeds one way or the other, we all have a problem.

Go nuts, give him a name that's so obviously fake and boring that people know he's using a pseudonym. Like Stephan Stevens or Thomas Price. "Really, Mr. Miqo'te sellsword, your name is actually Hugo Tanner?" "No, you're right. What name did you think would be appropriate for my race to have, Mr. Immortal Flame? Obviously, Hugo Tanner isn't ethnic enough for you." Remember, in real life, this man's name is Clifton Collins Jr.

Yeah, I honestly used to be a lot looser about research and stuff -- and then I started rping with this sarcastic mofo with a need for things to make sense. Every idea went through the grinder of his mind, with such questions as "How does that even work?", "Does that really make sense?" , "Why would they do that?", and one of my favorites, "Are we doing that? We're not doing that." (loosely paraphrased) He's bossy and brutally honest, but I really do feel like my writing has improved by going along with him. . .even when he shreds my ego into pieces. Still have a tendency to propose off the wall ideas to him that he takes all of .03 seconds to shoot down, but I've really learned quite a bit, and I feel like hte resulting rp feels fuller, I guess? I get more fulfillment out of it. And now I also do more research! Spent a few weeks researching the origination of the mafia for one rp, and Spanish court systems in the 15th-16th centuries for another. Still doing a lot of research into medieval trade (particularly around the mediterranean, because hte mediterranean is love) -- there is a lot of really, really cool stuff. Sounds like you've still got more time into it then I do, but hey, if you've got any fabulous links to stuff please do share. And, well, if you have ideas about brutal criminal stuff for Final Fantasy and don't mind forum rp, I'd be totally down. Actually, I'd say to check out a few television shows to get you into the mindset. HBO has run a few, especially series about prisons. Gangland is sort of my favorite series. It's annoying to watch sometimes on DVD because they have a tendency to catch people up, so you'll have a lot of stuff repeated between slots for commercial breaks. But they're very thorough on giving you a historical breakdown on how gangs form and dissolve. Netflix is your best friend, as you can catch up on a lot of more in-depth history through National Geographic. They have a lot not just on large syndicates, but also biker gangs, narcotics rings, and street gangs. It's really the street gang stuff that gets you into the mindset. Especially when you get interviews with active gang members and they talk about the sense of disenfranchisement in greater society versus acceptance in criminal culture. It's very similar to ancient tribalism. As to the second part, that's a lot like what architecture school and practice is like. Essentially, I've been doing that for some eleven years, so I totally get what you'd find helpful about it. It's a great way to learn in a hurry. As to the third part, I've no problem with forum RP. Wouldn't mind it at all, though I might have some delays finding time. I might restart RP in WoW because I've been thinking about my favorite character in WoW to RP as. Kind of looking forward to going grimy.

I do not mean to pick on you, because I actually deeply respect the sense of intensity and commitment you seem to bring to your characters, but I have such a hard time reading that OOCly, that I think my only legitimate IC reaction could be 'uh..... what?' Accents are tricky like that. A couple of people have mentioned all the traumas their characters have gone through, and admittedly that's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. My characters may have one or two defining traumas in their past, BUT, I fully explore those themes and don't arbitrarily heap on more drama for the sake of drama. I'm often left scratching my head, wondering... doesn't anyone like to rp... you know, HAPPY characters? WITH THAT SAID, one of the great things about rp communities is the diversity, and ability to provide content for a variety of different tastes. I see no reason why people of differing tastes cannot find common ground to work with if they rp here and there, but the truth is people will rp with other people who enjoy the same brand of storytelling they do. Think of a library. Everyone has vastly different tastes in books, hence why there is such a wide offering. You aren't likely to sit through a book you hate (unless its for school) so its no surprise if you find yourself unable to connect with a character or a storyline in rp as well. In short, everyone is entitled to their version of fun, and there should be no ill-will towards others who don't share the same brand of fun as you (I.e, 'actor' vs. 'Method actor') I love method acting. I wanna feel what my character is feeling because that is the draw of rp to me. I want my character to be telling me what to type on the screen, not me telling the character what to say. Is it possible to go in too deep? Absolutely. But like with all things, practice can help you hone your craft and be the most effective storyteller possible. His dialect is supposed to be somewhat hard to understand; he didn't learn Common in a school. He likes to say that he only went to Big Dumb Bastard University, and majored in Bastardeering and Interpretive Bastardry. Though you wouldn't have understood him saying that either...

The terrible part of me kinda wishes you played on Balmung so I could find you and mock-drama rp at you. Juuust because. Though I guess that's probably not a nice way to act towards strangers. Still though, temptation. But on a serious note, I'm not sure if by justice you mean violent justice or like interaction within the law's system. Because the latter is so much fun. Of course, I don't know, do you like verbal smack downs as much as physical ones? One thing I've always enjoyed was the game of insult-without-being-obvious-about-it, especially when there's a snippy old woman involved (gosh I love snippy old women, as long as they're not facing their wrath towards me). Political rps can be fun in the same way. Smack talk for daaaaays. Definitely violent justice. Not only that, but I suppose most people don't have the research put into criminal activity, gang culture, and organized crime that I do. One of my favorite things to do in RP is to bring that up and run with it. Take, for example, justice. Just about all criminal organizations, from your local slicer-dicer gang to La Familia have a strict code of silence. You don't go to the police ever, not just on behalf of a victim but on behalf of yourself. If someone breaks into your house, you don't call the police. If someone shoots your best friend, you don't call the police. You get justice yourself, blood for blood. That's not something, I hope, anyone here has experienced or really understood. It's not just that your angry and want revenge, it's literally an honor-bound code for vengeance and violence that you have no choice but to participate in. My smack talk generally serves as the early warning system that someone's about to go off the deep end. I have more suave characters that can dismantle you with words (Jaconsus St Croix comes to mind in WoW), but my favorite characters are usually the ones who drop a Dirty-Harry style one-liner to inform people that they are inviting an asswhooping. That whole, "If'n y'open y'mouth one more goddamn time, they're gonna need a good pair'a pliers t'pull y'teeth outta th'table, son..." sort of thing. People who talk about melodrama like that tend to earn derision or the sort of advice they probably wouldn't appreciate. "I dunno, kid, why don'tcha jus' chop th'guy up, toss'm n'a lake f'the critters t'eat, an' tell'r y'love'r at th'guy's memorial service? M'jus' sayin', y'ain't thinkin' solutions here." Ah, if only I could just move that character over. Love playing him. If only Final Fantasy had room for that sort of brutality, but even I feel like that would be a stretch. I'll have to get back into WoW a bit now that my internet is working.

I don't really understand this at all. What's uninteresting about playing believable characters? I mean, we can't all be sociopathic, weathered adventurers who have seen so much death and killed so many that it's as easy as pressing a couple buttons and watching things get shiny. If Antimony sees someone get killed, she's not going to just brush it off all "Ah, sentient blood! What a perfect accoutrement to my afternoon tea"-like. She's going to react like a person to whom death is a seriously frightening, grief-inducing, terrible event. And I don't really understand how that's boring. It's human emotion and gut and instinct, visceral and ugly and indifferent to the wants and needs of its bearer. I mean, I can understand someone not wanting to rp a "normal" person (I've rped my fair share of... weirdos, for a lack of a better word), but to not even want to interact with "normal" people? That's confusing as hell. Honestly, it really is that way. There might be drama in and around it, but I get bored, quick, when the focus of an RP is the drama. Mostly I think that's because I hated high school and if I wanted to listen to people's "feelings" all the time, I'd have paid more attention when I worked at Target. No, I'd rather talk about squeezing somebody so hard their head pops off. Seriously, though, I interact with normal people having crazy dramatic moments every single day. I don't want to make a hobby of doing it with imaginary people at home. I'd rather explore the drama associated with combat, crime, and justice. Actually, I'll be honest, I'd rather just RP where the drama can sometimes take a backseat to the sudden outbreak of violence. Nothing like sitting in a bar listening to people talk about their love life and wishing somebody would just throw a punch already.

To be fair, I have a hard time empathizing with other people's characters because, sometimes, I just don't get it. I mean, one second, we're in a struggle of life or death where, presumably from the story, death is possible and we're certainly killing people occasionally. It's hard for me to personally empathize with characters who ten minutes later can be whining about their personal relationships and drinking to their victory. Granted, a character I could actually empathize with would be boring as Hell, because this is a video game and it would be a dull one if the exciting parts had to be bookended by serious roleplay about the very real philosophy of mortality, loss, and the Hell of war. But I'm well aware these aren't real people. Sometimes, what best keeps me disconnected from everyone's characters is my suspension of disbelief. Which, thank God, because I've had to roleplay someone that had to display realistic and understandable emotions in a serious dramatic RP, and I was bored to tears. RP isn't a time I want to meet people who think and act like real people. RP is a time I want to go nuts with other people who are going nuts! The next time someone's head gets taken off in combat, I want people scrambling for the best sociopathic one-liner. "I guess he's seeing things from a new angle, now."

Maybe a bit incorrectly, but not that incorrectly. I just decided to pick up a quick way to do it. In fact, I'm somewhat disappointed by MMORPGs consistently making the worlds small and/or empty, but I'm more disappointed by the way MMORPGs handle travel. It might be an element of modern design, getting people as quickly as possible to the next vignette, but the core element of great fantasy isn't the goal, it's the journey. That's why Lord of the Rings was so great, getting to Mordor was a great adventure, it in and of itself was a place of no return, and the ring falling into the Crack of Doom was the culmination of the journey. It just seems to me that towns are too numerous, the world's not dangerous, and all we're doing is traveling from cell to cell of quest objectives. Travel is just a time sink in between quest and quest, not an interesting diversion where sometimes you run right through something random you didn't know would be there. Do you run through, say, the raging battle happening along the road you were traveling or do you know a pass through the caves nearby, which might have its own issues. We can handle this with modern technology. The harder part would be handling the NPCs in a more organic way, where animals might cover wide regions or bandits might move from place to place. However, I'd rather have server resources allocated to making a world unpredictable and dangerous and my drive space used to cover a massive, organic world. I've got ideas on how things like this might work, and I'd say most gamers do as well. But basically, it's too easy to get from A to B. It kind of ruins the idea of having an open, living, breathing, persistent world when it actually plays like pages in a book. Traveling shouldn't be an inconvenience or a time sink to be shortened, it should be, at the very least, a major part of the point.

Too bad you're on Balmung.

See, but I think you've confused two things that aren't in any way connected: difficulty and time management. Which, granted, isn't something I hold against you; EVERYONE does that. But a game being difficult, and a game requiring a lot of time to complete, are not the same thing. Take FFXI for example. People used to say it was a lot harder than WoW, and so it was. However, it wasn't hard because of the amount of time it took to level and work (which was significant). It was hard because as soon as you were out of the introductory levels, there was no solo play. You got your party in the Valkurm Dunes, pulled a mob into the party, and killed it. Ad nauseum. Not many games, for good reason, require a full party to do everything in the game. However, there are plenty of ways to make a game challenging and deep for people who only have two hours a day to play. One that comes to mind is setting up a set of outposts deep in wilderness, which means you can make the journey in two hour chunks to kill whatever you need to kill, but it might take you a week at that pace to get there. You might also need to stock supplies or use knowledge to craft survival items while out there. Sometimes you'd have to be careful because things might hunt you along the way, or you'll need to kill lesser enemies to get what you need as far as supplies go. That way, if you decide you want to take an expedition to kill something hard in the open world, it's an ordeal that you can do in small chunks; it would just take a lot of chunks. All you have to make sure is that all things can be completed in two hours, including the fight. You can make all those things, travel, combat, and gathering difficult. It doesn't necessarily have to be long. And let's face it, most of what people were complaining about in vanilla WoW wasn't how hard the game was, it was the logistical stuff that's been improved lately. I wouldn't want to go back to /lookingforgroup instead of having a Dungeon Finder, for example. Putting a PUG together back in the day was horrible.

What the Hell is wrong with you people?! I just said my characters had skinned people alive, tortured them, and engaged in all manner of evil debauchery and violence. Why DOESN'T anyone think there's something wrong with me?! My roleplay has at various times become sick and disgusting and I've played those characters sympathetically! Jeez, you people... In all seriousness, I'm rarely serious. I wouldn't take anything I say as a personal attack and my own ego is pretty bulletproof. I half expected someone to respond, "Well, most people should feel some kind of connection with their characters. Not you, Iggy. You need 24 hour care and one of those rooms with no inflexible protrusions or sharp edges." The whole point of the post, self-deprecation removed, is that I tend to play characters that, for some reason, people have a lot of sympathy, respect, and admiration for. Which is strange, because I most often play characters who engage in terrible violence, horrendous crime, and no small amount of indulgence. It's entertaining, and I feel like I can tap into an undercurrent of people's feelings where they can respect someone like that and even follow them, then see how low they're willing to follow the character into the hole in the ground they live in. I love the archetypical "dark knight", a villainous character of high moral principle that is just as likely to buy a poor kid an ice cream as he is to hide a police officer's body in a sewer for the rats to consume. I really like seeing what kind of decent people might end up following them and to see how they react to falling from grace. Which is fun, but I'm the last guy that says you need to have empathy with your characters. At the very least, be happy I'm not that well connected to mine. I've had people cry IRL when bad things happen to my character simply because people come to like and admire them. I don't; they don't deserve it. I do sometimes worry about people getting too attached to their characters and mine, though. There have been a few RP relationships that the individual players have taken too far, mistakenly thinking those feelings made their way OOC. Definitely not in my case, as I feel as much connection to the positive emotion of their love as I do to their anger when they're bodily ripping someone's ripcage out and wrapping it around their backs. Yes, that's happened in RP as well....

Okay. Starting to get bugged by this. So here is my "why." Why is it that you keep nit picking at the game over and over and over, only to claim "SE knob slobbing" or some other pointed near insult at a fan defending what they enjoy? I gotta know. Throw out the answer. I have been paying attention for a while, and I do have to say that that behavior is starting to seem wicked toxic. That said. Most of the stuff involving dungeons and not being able to send tells and all that is because of the whole on different servers that feed from many different servers that are separate from the ones the rest of the world is on. Also, that is not exactly what I would call "a feature critical to the success of an MMO in 2014." It is just a neat feature to have. Further, many of your "why's" are things you do not personally enjoy. Super. You are entitled to your opinion, and to share it. However, just because you do not like a feature, a boss, a dungeon, or whatever piece of content does not make it a terrible and stupid decision. It just means you don't like it, which you are perfectly free to do. People are also perfectly free to like and stick up for it. The game is far from perfect. Nothing is perfect. This is especially true of things built to have appeal to a mass audience. Not everyone is going to find it perfect or even agree on what near perfect is. So back to my "why." Why the stream of negativity at the game and the people that admit to being fans and enjoying it? Yar. Take it easy, the whole point of this is to stop letting game companies off the hook. And if the game is far from perfect, it's not a horrible thing to bring it up. What Square gets right in FFXIV is something a lot of companies don't put much thought into, what an MMORPG is fundamentally. Fundamentally, it's a coffee shop. It's a gathering place for like-minded people to have fun together and meet strangers. More than any other game, FFXIV gets that right. It rewards everyone with at least a little EXP that connects a swing on an enemy, whether it's in the party or not, no matter the level, and doesn't penalize the person fighting the enemy. It keeps the nodes for gathering localized to each player so we don't have to fight for resources (or lose out to a bot). You can get credit for quest mobs you kill even if they're out of party, so we don't have to fight for quest mobs. Compare that to WoW, where seeing another player can be a boon if you can get them to party up with you. Otherwise, they're nothing but competition that steals your resources. EVE made me actively loath seeing other players, because I simply knew, right out of the gun, that there is nothing in the game world we need to collaborate with strangers to do and every reason for them to kill me and take my stuff. So I had no desire nor reason to talk to anyone outside my corp. I've put together more friends in FFXIV than I have in any other game I've played in such a short time simply because it's so easy to meet other strangers and collaborate. Now, with that said... it's a bit like having a Ferrari in Butan; you've got one of the best precision engines ever made and nowhere to use it. For a lot of the reasons you brought up, it makes social interaction somewhat difficult sometimes and doesn't give you a lot to collaborate on. Maybe the occasional FATE that requires multiple people? You can't help on Levequests, so why are they in the open world for other people to see? You can't help on class quests either, and why can you see some of those? Worse, if you're in one, you can't call a friend for help unless they're in your LS, and even then they usually can't help you. Most of all, the worst question to ask is, "Why would we need to?" That's a big problem of every single MMORPG made that I can remember! Nothing requires that many people collaborating or gives you any sense of real danger because game developers handle us with kid gloves. Sometimes, games like EVE will try to tell us that games are hard because of PVP. It's artificial; all PVP-centric games are hard for however many people don't get more kills than they give. So even a bad PVP player would think the game is easy if everyone was at least worse than him. It's like saying that because you win your football division, you're a tough team to beat. You may just be in a weak division. The fact is, MMORPGs make everything too convenient for us. All the enemies are clustered in nice, polite patches off the main road, wandering around aimlessly for us to find. They have nicely-assigned levels that allow us to know what we're up against. They're tuned for one person at a time and, if not, we have tools to adequately decide how many people we need. Enemies never hunt us or give us a hard time, if it's necessary that's what we let players do. PVP-centric games sin a lot in this regard, as they tend to make the PVE breathtakingly benign. Hell, in EVE, if there were no other players, there would be nothing to stop you. Not that WoW or FFXIV are much better, enemies often offer only token resistance and being "jumped" is a scripted affair. It's done in other games, being hunted and not being the upper echelon of a thin food chain. They appear sometimes in MMORPGs in spurts. EVE, to their credit, did put in something like that, the Sansha Incursions. There were some patrolling world bosses that could sneak up on you and ruin your day in vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade (the Fel Reavers just seemed to sneak up on you). There's just not enough of it; the worlds we're paying to play in aren't dangerous enough. That work is being either compartmentalized (in instances and raids) or outsourced (in open world PVP). You always get your party together and hunt the dragon. The dragon never hunts you. I think that's the biggest failing of modern development. They haven't yet made the MMORPG that emphasizes the social aspect by making you pray to everloving God somebody finds you or making you grateful to see someone come to help. That'd emphasize everything an MMORPG can do that no other game can. PVP, raids, instances, everything can and has been done in other genres of games much more effectively. It's this one thing that an MMORPG can simulate that nothing else can, meeting random people in an open world to tackle open world problems. To date, I haven't seen anyone able to pull it off. Not that it's impossible, game developers are either not seeing that opportunity literally dangling in front of their faces, or they're simply too lazy to develop it.

I've played a character before that has nailed a woman (literally with carpenter nails) naked to a table and interrogated her by skinning a tattoo off her hip and tossing it down on her face. He finally got her to talk by preparing to slice off her finger to show her the ring she was wearing, having her tell him it had come from her husband, and threatening to have them find her husband to torture him as well. It was fun, it was tense, it was dramatic, it was absolutely 100% not something I'd ever want to empathize with. I've had a great many heroic roleplaying characters in my time, but I've also played characters that, at various times, have burned down an orphanage after killing everyone inside, had a witness killed and disposed of in order to get a murderer acquitted, and had one character bring a yearlong forum RP thread end by killing his own fiancee on behalf of his employer after leaving his entire gang to death. If you want to know what I love best about RP, it's that several of the characters I've played that have done that, I've had people feel sympathetic, friendly, and respectful towards, despite all of that. But I would assume no one would want me to actually empathize with these characters. I play characters that are very different from me, so I don't necessarily feel everything they feel. Generally, if you're a bruiser for a local criminal syndicate, I personally feel like you've got nothing to be proud of and nothing to feel sorry about if one of your associates dies on the street. These guys aren't me personally, though, so I have to run the RP through the lens of that character and whatever reactions they have. Way more fun that way, I personally haven't killed anybody and I don't know magic. I don't want to RP a happily married architectural designer that gets annoyed when his dogs don't get out of the way. The fun of RP is playing someone else, often someone completely different.

I'm sort of a weird player, I suppose, in that I tend to fly by the seat of my pants (I don't often plan things ahead of time too closely), but I have VERY little emotional attachment to my characters. I think it's because of how I play them; they're very different from me. Normally, when I've had to referee an IC/OOC issue, it almost always comes back to someone's character being a lot like them. If anyone's met Ignacious and had the opportunity to be offended by him yet, I'm not like him. I'm a fairly decent person with a fairly normal 9-5 job in a respectable field, with a wife and two dogs outside a city in Ohio. Ignacious is a former-soldier-turned-mercenary with a very nihilistic view on life, an often lazy streak to go nicely with his mean streak, and a violent personality. Hell, sometimes, if things happen to him that aren't so good, I kind of figure the asshole deserves it. I mean, he's not a completely horrible person, but he does kill animals and people for a living so he wouldn't make a decent living in customer service. It's just one of those things where sometimes people make their characters very similar to themselves, living vicariously through them. It's probably not a good idea in a setting where we can all influence the story; it's probably better for just pure storytelling on your own time. If you're feeling too attached to your character, try developing parts of their personalities to be unlike you. Otherwise, every insult, failure, and relationship breakup that happens in-character is going to feel like it happened to you personally. Which, if that's your thing, that's fine. It just makes OOC relationships with people a little strained when they're constantly having to alter character angles to account for your personal feelings.

Apologies for being out of the loop so long. I just moved into a new place and they haven't hooked up the net yet. FFXIV isn't very taxing, but I'm actually surprised at the low number. WoW has blistered a 3 mb/s connection for me before (Ah, the days when my 3 mb/s connection was considered muscular) by dumping about 20 megs of data to instantly choke the bandwidth in Ironforge. Pure lists, that. However, that makes me think not just that FFXIV isn't the craziest game for data transfers, but that maybe people have gotten a lot smarter about how to move that data. It may have something to do with how it's all separated into zones rather than being purely open world. Still, to that point, you probably wouldn't need much in the way of customization to keep people satisfied. At that data load, you can probably get away with quite a bit, especially if it's loaded after the major character data. I had to "settle" for a 20 mb/s connection in my area (unfortunately, they haven't upgraded the Pickerington cable network since the Bronze Age) but otherwise I would have been able to push 50 or 100 in other, more developed parts of the city. Even if you did pipe a hundred times that data per character, it wouldn't affect the overworld game area. And I suppose that's the important part, rather than how fast I see other characters appear in a city. EVE's battles aren't getting bigger due to technical resources, though, they're starting to get bigger (at least when the Halloween War was kicking off) because all this time that nullsec corps have been reasonably stable, they've been building these massive backlogs of titans and dreads. So it just so happens that when the major alliances DO get off their nullbear asses and do something, it tends to blow more resources than before. There was a time when having a titan was a big deal, but before I stopped playing even some of the smaller RP corps were getting them off the assembly line. Luckily, EVE's data steam is almost insignificantly small. An Avatar is an Avatar, and pulse lasers are pulse lasers. List data for each individual ship is probably a line of code we can type ourselves. If positional data wasn't so complicated, I'd imagine they wouldn't even need TiDi. It helps that EVE space is often a vast desert, as well. They don't have to handle the entirety of their game field because if there's nothing to warp to, there's nothing to worry about. Really, though, I think that's sort of the problem with us as a gamer culture (if such a thing exists). We have a tendency to criticize stuff that doesn't matter and ignore stuff we shouldn't. People who play games aren't all stupid or ignorant; I think we have a right to expect that developers can come up with better ideas than we do. Yet most of the best ideas in MMORPGs especially came from players who didn't shut up on forums. At the very least, I think we should be able to intellectually debate the philosophy behind where we want our games going. I'm personally just disappointed in the whole endeavor at this point; games are developed using film as a model instead of sculpture or architecture, so they're much more often built as a series of vignettes along a rail than as a space to be inhabited. That's the problem with taking a media that can handle persistent action of infinite variety and modeling everything after a two-dimensional media that is temporal in nature. And yet, inexplicably, everyone that bucks this particular trend in gaming makes the ridiculous choice to not design a game around it. It's almost like game companies haven't really looked at the core advantages, disadvantages, and promises of an MMORPG yet. Say what you will about FFXIV being mostly a series of short stories told in a row interspersed with random quests you can take elsewhere, Square at least understands the fundamental strength of an MMORPG. Most companies haven't even thought about it. I have a lot of respect for that, I just wish they'd have done something a bit more original than make a more respectable copy of WoW built out of an older developmental failure. Sad that I still think it's the second best MMORPG in the field considering that pedigree, but Square understands how to get us our money's worth for the subscription we pay. Maybe that's just testament to the weakness of modern design as it is; you can just be good at the pedestrian stuff and still be at the top of your division. Most companies can't even handle the basics with grace, so it's not worth bragging about the things they did spend their time on. If you can't skate or handle the puck, you can't brag about how well you shoot; you'll only get the benefit if you stand still on the ice in the right place with nothing else trying to stop you.

I actually have worked in 3ds Max, Radiant, Maya, and FormZ, and today I work in Revit. I'm not an expert in everything code, but I do know quite a bit about data transmittal. I did a study in school about the connections between digital design and architecture, and how architectural design can influence video game environments and perspectives. I just don't think people really give designers credit (or scorn) or examine the decisions they have to make. Especially the poor hard code guys (my brother does that for a living); they work really hard to make sure we don't notice how hard it can be to move data by hiding it. I mean, you can not believe me, but try logging into a major city and see what your transmission and received data spikes to. Since the city is all loaded, it's all character data. You don't have to take my word for it. As a point of interest, I asked how this sort of thing might work if some of my friends were doing it (some of whom are definitely in the "sliders" camp). The best summary says that it's actually somewhat common practice to send the data in bits that get rendered in order of necessity. So the computer gets the necessary list data for the basics first, then the variables later. While this makes the amount of raw data larger (because then you need to transmit it in pieces in a code your computer will understand to put it together in), it does mean most people could use that sort of data to get a higher level of customization without bogging down the game. Another point was the cumulative effect of data transmittal in a game like an MMORPG, that if you suddenly appear in a room with 39 other players, not only do you need data on all 39 people, but those 39 people need data on you. A friend of mine that used to work at 3d Realms (Lord knows where he works now) talked about that in WoW once, so I asked him. Apparently, it depends a lot on how it is integrated. He said that, if you have a nose on a list, and you just have to apply a quantity to it, it might not be so bad, it's just a few extra numbers that gets plugged into a formula. It's once you're dealing with multivariable movement that things start to get really heavy. On your client-side rendering point, he did bring something up. I usually don't think about it; my computer was recently built and is pretty muscular, and I've always had a fairly well-equipped machine. He said that such information, regardless of the transmission, has to be kept in active memory if it's being used to do GPU calculations. It's getting to be less of a problem now because the cache sizes are rising and the RAM is getting easier to buy at higher prices, but he said he'd probably worry more about that if it was his game he was designing. The more customized numbers each individual character has, the more active memory gets eaten and can't be released until the character exits the rendering area. System resources in PCs can be so variable, and players so harsh, that if someone has an otherwise phenomenal computer but is chugging due to one component (say, the rest of the PC is great but the RAM has been outpaced), someone could complain about the design when it really wasn't their fault. Therefore, MMORPGs have a tendency to be designed for a lower common denominator of computer, and they use some older techniques to shore up the graphical backlog. So he said computers that have highly adjustable characters will probably lose something in the transition simply because you have to keep in mind that people don't all run the SOA hardware. He said if you look closely enough, you see where they saved the resources. So while the server load seems to be a problem (especially, my brother tells me, on the server's side, since the amount of data they actually push per second is mind-boggling), it's not the largest. That's where you're probably right, what's not a problem for my hardware personally might be a problem for someone else. There also seems to be a workaround for it by just loading things in order of priority rather than all at once. However, this isn't always used, so if a game has a universally hard time loading intense character data at once, it could be that this wasn't kept in mind. It also makes it a bit more intense on the server, as then every quest is parsed into bits of data over time that need to be stopped and okayed (though those bits are smaller than getting it all in one big chunk). That's what I've got on it so far. I'm far more critical of the pedestrian stuff than most people considering my background, I suppose. I'm in a budget-heavy design field and I'm kind of half-in, half-out of the world of hard computer programming. My biggest problem with MMORPGs, especially the crop coming out now, is that they have a bad habit of wasting their strengths and trying to gloss over their weaknesses. They have a tendency to be developed just like every other single-player game, just with more people involved (sort of that quest-grind/world-PVP dichotomy). That seems like quite the waste, especially since the answers are out there. I imagine most people could come up with a decent way to escape that "traditional" MMORPG patois, just that we don't seem to get games developed that way.

I think people just aren't aware of how much data is being sent between the local server and your computer at any one time in an MMO. The idea that all your character data, even in something relatively simple like FFXIV is measured in a few bytes, means you think that what your computer is transmitting is your stated 364 bytes of data because that's all your computer needs to construct your character in the character generator locally. That'd be nice, but it's absolutely not true. If every single thing was a listed item, like it is in WoW, you're still looking at a pretty shocking amount of data. I run on a rather pedestrian (these days) 20 mb/s connection and even walking into a crowded Stormwind, it can take a while for everyone to pop up. Stormwind renders beautifully, people are still spontaneously showing up in existence after two minutes. That's no sliders. Remember that the central server can't send you a simple command like hair6 on its own, or the game wouldn't recognize it. Also, imagine the kind of data you're shipping on parametrics, which FFXIV has relatively few of (not that you'd really notice, they do a fantastic job of giving you a lot of options with sheer list items). In a game with a more intensive and variable character generator, those aren't just line items, they're complete parabolic formulas (if they're being economical) getting loaded with every new character that shows up. That's in addition to constantly updating character and enemy locations, character and enemy actions, any computer-controlled pets or minions in an area, any transportation being handled by the central server that's in your field of vision. It's a lot of data to be adding to already. Which wouldn't be a problem if MMORPGs weren't places characters very often do show up out of the blue (that's one of the defining features of an MMO, after all) and are often the most important sprites in the area with you (they're very often killing or helping you, or there's not much point to making it an MMORPG). The internet connection is a very tight pipe that backs up the data you can send. The more you can keep local and not have to send, the better. Which is why FFXIV will give you an option like "highlights" and give you the option of two colors. Near-infinite hair variety, all on a list they can save to your local. They let your graphics engine sort out the texture fade. You don't have to take my word for it, though. Open your network connection window, make sure FFXIV is in windowed mode, teleport to Ul'dah and take a look at how much raw data you have to pull when zoning into a new area with an actual population. Ul'dah is saved to your local, so everything you'll be pulling up will be character and NPC data. It's probably more than you'd think. It also doesn't help that you can't design MMORPGs for a 50 mb/s connection; not everyone has access to that kind of muscle. So even if you HAVE a high-end internet connection, you may not be able to use all the available bandwidth. Hard code designers are an underappreciated species in the design world. Nobody notices when they do something right, everyone notices when they screw up. Definitely nobody appreciates the decisions they have to make for your game engine. EVE is definitely having station walking issues from a technical standpoint, though. Remember, they also told us that they were surprised that they led a few thousand highsec newbies into the teeth of a nullsec warzone and had to change their direction. They're not that incompetent, they just bite off way more than they can chew and backtrack. Did you see the engine their current captain's quarters is rendered in? Imagine their incredibly deep customization having to be loaded and unloaded every time someone walks into or out of a station with everyone else. Everything in their game is about unlimited everything and everyone is on "one" server. Most people's bandwidth simply doesn't have the muscle (and their server team simply doesn't have the personnel) to make that work with any efficiency. I know the RP community I talked to was annoyed that they didn't have it until we worked out the logistics of it in a channel one day. Their ship work, on the other hand, is very deliberate. The reason you never got that custom paint job idea that's been knocking around a few years (until now if you want to count a few more listed paint colors) is because of the server load when you're talking about thousands of ships now having an RGB slider. And an RGB slider is one of the easiest and most basic customization options that has been developed in gaming; it's older than the polygon. It's more taxing than you'd think, though, when you go from shipA, colorschemeC, weapon6(1-8) to a list of parametric variables, polygons, custom colors. You're not talking about a few bytes, that code can run up into kilos and then exists as a custom, separate entity within the rendering engine (as opposed to when you have, say, a bunch of script-rendered bushes that are all the same for a few hundred feet in a game like FFXIV). I think you're somewhat simplifying the process, which makes all this seem relatively trivial. Game design's not really about pretty cities and particle effects; even I could put those together relatively easily. Successful games trick you into thinking there is no economy of data they're wrangling, but I guarantee you that it is the number one issue in designing an MMORPG. If you look into FFXIV, even, almost everything about it is designed to hide the internet connection, from character creation down to the combat. So it is a little sad to hear that EVE uses that spaceship design, even with the new SoE ships, because they're too lazy to update rather than having a viable reason. They just aren't going to tell the player base that. Player communities are notoriously unsympathetic to the realities of server loads. That's why your armor can have a ton of polygons and be very well textured, it's all a list; armor107236 is a very simple line item to transmit, then your computer can handle the rendering or not). While it may seem like that's a horrendous drain on resources, it's not a drain on anything Square has responsibility for. However, armor107236, colors R:26, B:225, G:167, shoulder size: 105.67 would be a pretty simple customization for that armor piece, but would drastically increase the amount of data needed just for your computer to draw it, much less be told how to draw it in an open-world battleground for fifty people constantly popping in and out of the rendering space. I hope this is starting to make sense. It's not crazy. This stuff is a big deal in the less-sexy corridors of design. On the subject of AI, that's actually not true. It's not a problem of being able to make a reactive, intelligent AI enemy. In fact, they'd had that in three dimensions as early as the mid 90s. It is a lot more complicated than a character generator, but the reason I bring it up is because it's a lot more complicated to run in an MMO. Did you ever wonder why enemies almost always hold their ground in an MMORPG and only move when scripted? It definitely isn't because we haven't been able to program AI to fight for better tactical position or change tactics based on the situation, it's because that is an interplay between character and enemy that's simply staggering in an MMORPG. Imagine that an enemy would have to be able to react to a relatively large set of stimuli, all of which was coming from a distant source over an internet connection of indeterminate speed, which would then have to be translated into an action sequence and sent to those same players who would, we'd assume, have to react to it. It's possible, but some of the niceties of character design would be a significant drain to that. It's one of the reasons Monster Hunter never went truly unlimited in an open world; adaptive AI is extremely hard to operate in an MMO environment. It's also one of the reasons combat slows WAY down as graphical quality and customization increase as a rule of thumb. It's one of the reasons FFXIV's global cooldown is so slow, why enemies that appear tend to wait a few seconds to be attacked before they start their own attack sequences, why we have so much time and a big orange box to get out of the way. It's all because they're trying to mask the internet connection. Imagine walking into a FATE with the huge datapackets you'd have in EVE for each individual character. And would it be worth it in that scenario? Does it really matter in that instance whether the nose is crooked slightly to the left when it's just some other player in a FATE? It's all well and good to poo-poo the idea, but that's the kind of decisions you'd have to make designing a game. It doesn't get the same press, but it's a far more immediate concern in an MMORPG than water effects. Try to step outside the boundaries of your own computer and into theirs, maybe this stuff will make more sense.

I think the problem is that you guys are examining this as a polygon solution, all self contained within a local system. MMORPGs aren't like that, as so much data has to be sent to you from the central server. I think it's not always apparent how the data gets to you or sometimes how long it takes to get there. The GPU, playing with your personal polygons on screen, might be relatively fast. We're talking about a Stormwind City scenario, walking into a place where you're going to get rendering instructions on a few hundred players at a time. Aion's actually one of those games that had the problem, but hid it well (we looked it over to see how it was going to handle the game for just that reason). We got a relatively decent (at the time) PC to chug by walking into Sanctum during a REALLY crushing population boom. The amount of character data you had to load at the time simply choked it out, not only did the framerate stutter, but people were popping into existence from nowhere. Luckily, Aion's graphics, while appearing pretty, used World of Warcraft-style methods of saving bandwidth. Like I said, the more crap you throw onto a local list, the more you tax the system rather than the connection. So you'll see arcades of what look like the same stamp of modular wall over and over again, and in fact that's exactly what it is. I wasn't much of a fan of Aion's gameplay, but I can appreciate the smart design choices and the economy of the computer. They made as much as they could local and did their best to keep things to list. It freed up space for the character variety. I think a lot of people kind of think of that as cheating, in a way, but NCSoft, for all their flaws, were very aware of how hard they'd be taxing the servers with the character generator. But this is why we don't really have enemies that have deep AI. The enemies are controlled by the network server, not the local drive, and so if you start eating the bandwidth for use in character modeling, there's less you can allocate to the position and reaction of enemies. It's one of the reasons that games have generally opted to limiting the size of parties and raids. While it's generally assumed that it's meant to make it easier to put a raiding party together, what it's actually doing is limiting the information zipping back and forth between players and server. Imagine you're in a raid, and an AOE goes off that hits every single member of a 40 man raid. Every character has a longwinded formula determine their damage, which is then sent to them and everyone else in the raid, so they all know what their health is at. If there's a status effect, that means not only does the server tell you that you have it, but the other 39 people as well. What this essentially means is that, as characters are added and variables added that need to be sent back and forth, the growth of data is exponential, not proportional. It doesn't seem like much, sending the variables of things like noses to every other character in an area with a hundred players, but every single character needs that information sent to the other 99 people and needs to receive the information of those 99 people. Instancing has helped a lot, since this means that big boss fights tend to be fought with people who know each other and have limited information it needs to send (at that point, mostly skeletal movement and raw gameplay data). That's much more of a problem in the kinds of open worlds people say they really want. There's a reason EVE Online has limited ship models and colors with little customization of the actual ship avatar. You can play with the character creator all you'd like, all it needs is a snapshot. Its character creator, coupled with its high graphical polish, means that EVE players won't be able to congregate at a station for a long time. It's incredibly difficult to pull off that kind of data transfer. Just some of the things that get handled behind the scenes that isn't always appreciated. In the grand scheme of things, as I said, I'd much rather my bandwidth was spent giving an enemy the ability to track me stealthily and ambush me across a mile of terrain rather than giving me the ability to position a custom scar wherever I want on my jaw. Nice as it might be, I RPed for a very long time without video games and my powers of literary description have always outpaced even the most powerful character generators. Then again, it doesn't look like anyone's using that economy of server load to allocate to AI or other gameplay attributes. Parametric customization is better than nothing, and everyone seems to be at least capable of making that. Shoddy AI seems to also permeate games that can't use server load as an excuse.

It's a bit more complicated than that. If it was all contained within our local software, that'd be the case. It isn't, though. Every time a player character walks into your render zone, you have to receive information on their character to tell your GPU what it is rendering and then raytracing. In World of Warcraft (as an example of a very simple character designer) hair, color, face, skin color, everything is determined by a list. You might have hair 1, hair color 6, face 2, and that is saved locally to your hard drive. Let's go the extreme route. You've got sliders to everything. Every single character doesn't use a set of presets, it's all parametric in this example. That means that receiving character data from another player means that the central server has to send that information to the computer and then those dimensions need to be saved to your local memory. For five characters at a time, it's not terribly taxing. For a hundred? That's a ferocious tax on resources. FFXIV kind of runs in the middle, where sliders tend to be somewhat general information that isn't as difficult to store (e.g. height). But it is why EVE Online hasn't had station walking put in yet. They put in so much as far as character customization goes that it would max the RAM in anyone's computer to have more than 30 players in the same place. The worst of it, though, is how taxing it is to the server communication with the players. Not everyone has a 100 mbs connection, and rendering that way takes time. A full on raytrace in a program like Revit, which doesn't use any lists, can take a half hour to run a frame at 1680. It's more hardcore than you'd think. The more you can drop into a list on the local drive, the faster your computer can process it all simply because it's all on your local storage, rather than having to load it from the central server for each individual instance.

This is another reason why I didn't want to report. I have my filter off by choice, because under reasonable circumstances I receive no shock value from people swearing. The filter is often more of an annoyance to me. ... If you were my kid, you would've had worse things than soap in your mouth >_> Kids don't have a reason to know or use swears until they hit puberty and have acne, growing pains, period cramps, and have wet dreams when they doze off in the middle class. Aaaanyways. Person is on /blist, and if the person wants to try and RP to me, hopefully someone will nudge me and I'll pull them off the list to see what they want. Ultimately, it saves my husband the hassle of dealing with me when I get irritated. Well I didn't use it in front of my mom! :lol: I didn't have a death wish! I was smart enough in first grade to keep my filthy language where it belongs, on the playground. Anyway, if he's used that word that many times, have you thought that maybe he has some kind of condition. I know if I'd said cunt thirty times in thirty minutes and Guinness people weren't standing near me with a stopwatch, people would think I'd gotten lost from my care assistant.

What's nonessential to you is clearly of high importance to many. While I maintain my earlier stance that a game which over-markets its graphics might be hiding an extremely thin gameplay experience, I do think that character customization is important. These are our personas, not just some pixels but characters we play often for years. For a roleplayer, the connection is arguably even deeper, and many of us appreciate the opportunity to modify our character to get them as close as possible to what we imagine in our heads. I for one spend absurd amounts of time looking at my character and others'. As a roleplayer who had to imagine what characters look like in book games for years before we got MMORPGs, I'd much rather the game spend its resources making the world interesting, variable, and the AI more realistic than making sure we can crook our noses ever-so-slightly to the left. I can imagine someone broke your character's nose five years back and it healed crooked, but I can't imagine that the endgame combat is more interesting than it actually is. In the grand scheme of limited resources, character customization is probably not where the games industry is missing most of its opportunities. When we have a game where the world is truly engrossing, the combat is truly exciting, the story is truly captivating, and the enemies are blisteringly difficult, and they have a little bit of space left over before the median system starts to graphically chug and some time to implement it, then we can have the nose slider. It seems like focusing on graphics and highly specific character customization in your MMORPG is a little bit like paying very close and detailed attention to the interior stitching on the upholstery in a car whose engine runs like crap and dies after two years. It doesn't matter how nice the interior is if nobody's driving the car anymore. Personal opinion.

This. You don't need a ton of profanity to do it either. An excerpt from my WoW RP chat log with a woman from a month ago. XXXXX: Really? I don't think any woman ever said "yes" to you. Zumoktaga: S'aight, I can't figure y'ever told'a guy "no."