Nekojin

There was some progress on the route to Sonata, but not enough to really give a good update. RL interfered with one of the participants, and we had to stop for the night. I will say, however, that the distance traveled - that is, the distance at the Azure Dreams Waystone to the East and West - shows more than 1000 tiles of Catseyes laid down. Woot!

Mystic Shores has requested that I submit them for the map: 1802, 1577

+ 1 Simple solutions to trivial problems.

On Monday (I think), after talking with someone (HawkHawk?) about this highway, I went and took a look at the Highway to our West. The paving had already been done most of the way, so I smoothed out the area our chunk of road was on, connected them up, and started laying down Catseyes. I used up all of my Catseyes (and I'm still completely out), and got to ~150 tiles away from the Catseye chain coming the other direction. We should be able to get that connection done this weekend. I have been in communication with the folks around the large lake West of Sonata, and the Highway should be close to Olive Branch by now. I have plans to go over there on Friday to help find a workable path from there to Sonata. With luck and a little community involvement, we may well be connected from Sonata all the way to the West Shore by the end of this weekend! The biggest question is whether to bull straight East past Olive Branch (who has expressed interest in having the Highway near them - we're taking as many people into consideration as possible), or turn Southeast to go over the hill close by Sunflower. Here's (approximately) how it looks right now from where I am: (Apologies for not including the further West sections - I haven't walked far enough to confirm it, and didn't want to draw it too badly)

Politics has me thinking about some songs that I love, but don't hear often. I present Toy Matinee, by the too-brief band, Toy Matinee. Lyrics:

If you don't mind the spoiler...

Can you not remember, or read, your own post a few back? Let me emphasize the relevant points: If you have two side-by-side deeds and block off the perimeter, it could be seen (depending on the circumstances) as you blocking rightful traffic. If, on the other hand, you merge the two deeds and simply own the middle instead of trying to pussyfoot around the highway "issue," it's yours with no room for argument, and Highway people will have to find another way to go around. Or, you know, you could just communicate with Highway builders and give some guidance. Most Highway planners, myself included, would be more than happy to accommodate your preferences if we knew about them. Placing buildings in the perimeter solely to block Highways and avoid communicating is reasonably seen as passive-aggressive.

Do we really have to keep having this argument 3 times a week? You pay nothing for the 5-wide perimeter, it is added to the outskirts of your Deed and costs nothing. If you wish to pay more to expand the area of your perimeter - perhaps so that you can guarantee that you have land to expand into, a "reservation" of space to own in the future - it's still not your land. This has been stated by GMs and Admins many times, and you're not going to win that argument. As for controlling two adjacent deeds and blocking off the perimeter - why not just make it one deed and be done with it? That way, you own it all, there's no passive-aggressive BS to "keep people out."

5h is the most you can gain for yourself, but it's functionally a soft cap - events can give you up to 10h. And, IIRC, there were some circumstances that got people as high as 12h, but again, it was the result of GM/Admin action, not something that you can achieve normally.

I want to like this idea, but adding a new ore vein wouldn't play well with the existing already-mapped worlds. It'd have to be for a new world, or you'd get a very sparse distribution that could potentially be gamed by some people. Having it as a random mining "bonus" like flint and rocksalt seems like it'd work better. +.25, idea is good, but needs more polishing.

Note that I'm not saying that Gorman wasn't misogynistic, just that what you've seen of him isn't the whole story. He was very much a man of his era, and the Gor books themselves are based loosely on the John Carter of Mars books (Edgar Rice Burroughs), which is just as much of a male power fantasy series with fairly purple prose. But then, virtually all of the pulp-era sci-fi and fantasy books (and before) are, when you drill it down to the basics, male power fantasies. Very, very few female protagonists, and the female support characters are often either beautiful and interested in the protagonist, or already wed, or old and/or ugly. Norman's stuff just took it to an extreme that paid well.

Yes and no. IMO, there's a difference between feeding* a fetish - which is what the Gor novels do - and being simply misogynistic. I'm not sure exactly where the lines are for what's acceptable for discussion in these forums, but I'm betting that discussing the Gor novels will cross that line pretty quickly. That said, there's three counterpoints to Norman being misogynistic. 1.) Don't assume that a section of an artist's work is a direct reflection of the artist's actual mindset and desires. Otherwise, you'd have to assume that, say, the musician Sting has the hots for preteen/teenage girls, is suicidal, and is a creepy stalker. 2.) The other books that Norman wrote outside of the Gor series don't have the same psychology/philosophy. (And note that Norman was a professor of psychology before he started writing) 3.) There are ample examples within the Gor books of the roles being reversed - a woman in power holding male slaves in similar fashion, something that wouldn't happen if they were purely misogynistic screeds. * Or you could call it pandering, and you would not be wrong.

I had always assumed that Parent skills gave some small buff in sub-skills that were below its score, so that someone who had trained extensively with one sort of sword (for example) wasn't a complete buffoon in combat when they pick up a different kind of sword for the first time. The techniques are similar, the "keep the pointy/edged bits away from me" is the same, so experience in one should confer some ability to handle similar weapons at least semi-competently. Then again, this is Wurm, so it's entirely possible that everything I just said is wrong. 😸

Fair enough. I've seen people say it, and not be corrected, in the CA-Help channel quite a few times, including from people who are CAs. But I'll take that as true for the moment. I still falls back to the point of what the purpose is. If you want to keep people away from your Deed, you can make a 1xsomething building, as long as your Carpentry can support, and keep people from laying a highway too close that way (or two at opposite ends of the deed), but that still becomes something that will require maintenance. And for what? Preventing a theoretical highway that may never exist? Or is the highway planning happening "now" and "you" just can't be bothered to communicate with the Highway planners to let them know your preferences? There's lots of ways to prevent problems, but combative "counter-building" isn't one of the good ways.

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking or maneuvering toward, but yes - building a 2-wide shack in your outer perimeter will prevent people from placing a highway there. But given how perimeters cause increased damage ticks to structures within them, that'd mean you'd either have to build the shack to at least medium QL, or keep going back and repairing it every few days, to keep it intact. Just to keep a Highway out, and only a few more tiles away? Why? You could just as soon extend your Deed enough tiles to keep the Highway as far away from your main area as you want. If you're simply offended that people want to have a Highway in your perimeter, then you're falling for the same fallacy that so many of these arguments start from, assuming that the perimeter somehow belongs to you. Note that they could still build a highway that runs right up next to the shack - that's not a deed, after all.

No. Frank Miller's stuff has good storylines, but hugely misogynistic tendencies in everything he touches. I have yet to see a single story he's written that didn't have women as, pardon the phrasing, "whores or warriors, or both." (Borrowed from a critique blog). Spoilered, because I really don't want this thread to turn into an argument on Frank Miller.

Drop 1g into a wishing well, and find out!

This is incorrect. A 1-tile wide perimeter would allow for a road, but not a Highway unless the person had all of the right permissions from BOTH deeds. Placing a Catseye or Waystone checks everything in a 3-tile circle around it. If that radius would cross over into a deed where the planter has permissions, the Catseye/Waystone cannot be planted, and therefore the Highway cannot be placed. With a 5-wide Perimeter, it's always still possible to plant Highways on the outer edge of the Perimeter.

I've been informed that each Deed is restricted to only one Alliance. You can only have one group of people to coordinate and associate with. If I have two neighbors who can't stand each other, I can't join an Alliance with either of them without upsetting the other. Since the main functions of Alliances are altered permissions on-deed and a private, dedicated communication channel, it would seem that multiple Alliances should be doable, and not require outside communications channels (IE Discord) in order to communicate with different groups of people for different purposes. Games as old as Wurm like City of Heroes were able to allow people to have multiple Alliances (SuperGroups). So I propose the following: Allow multiple Alliances, each one having their own communication channel. If there should be a limit, it should be fairly high - 10 or so. Deeds can set different permissions for each Alliance. Will this mean that some people will have many Alliance communication tabs? Yes it does. But that's their problem to deal with. Will it increase the server-side load? Yes, especially at first, but it will also result in fewer Private Message channels, which should offset some of the new load. This shouldn't be too much for modern hardware to manage. Will this make it easier for PvP'ers to engage in cutthroat backstabbing maneuvers? No, not really - if anyone's doing this, they're already using Discord, Skype, or some other comms channel of choice.

I'm highly interested in this. Would this perhaps be a way to actually make a Deed on water? Highways over water without needing Bridges? More information is needed!

Although there's not enough info to really make a concrete discussion, it sounds like the situation you describe is a problem of clashing personalities, not one of perimeter drama. Changing the perimeter sizes smaller wouldn't solve that, it'd make it worse. The only real solution would be for one or both of the parties to vacate, move somewhere else where they aren't in close proximity to each other. But both feel too heavily invested in their location, so they don't want to move, they want the other to move. This is the sort of conflict that GMs are hired to deal with. This is a game. Things are already vastly simplified over reality. Solutions that would work in reality are usually complex and complicated, something that works IRL may not have any contextual relationship to things that happen in games. Trying to apply real-life examples of problems is rife with contextual irrelevance that can make the comparison moot. And they have already analyzed the data, which is why they have already said that they have no plans to change how perimeters work. Which is partly a shame, because... ... this is a good suggestion, and one I would support.

Again, shortening it to 1 tile would not solve any of that drama, it would just change it to slightly different arguments. The net total of drama would not go down, and might go up. Let's put it another way: What specific problem do you see this solving? Is it common? How would this fix it? Why would it work if consolidating into a single deed would not?

I was still an avid weekly comic-shop attendee when TMNT #1 hit the stores (and yes, I know how that dates me). I thought it was ridiculous, and at that time, I thought that black-and-white comics was lazy and boring. By the time it hit issue #6, there was enough talk about it that I realized I'd missed the boat, and possibly missed out on a high-value comic in my collection. It's easy to say that the first few stories of TMNT were rough - because they were. But they improved rapidly. My opinion on black-and-white comics changed when I read an indie X-Men parody titled XMEN (pronounced "Zhmen"). It was too good to need coloring. After that, I started looking at some of the other indie stuff like Usagi Yojimbo and Judge Dredd. Somehow, I missed both Hellboy and Cerebus.

If you're annoyed by it, you can silence the ones near you. That's the solution if you're annoyed. Don't force that solution on everyone.

I realize that this is exceptionally low-priority, but it would be a nice boost to people who have spent the silver to have Wagoners in their area. As it stands now, it seems that there are only a couple of comments for each category of Wagoner chatter, and since there aren't any other Deeds attached to the Highway I'm on yet, that also means that one entire category of the chat (probably the most detailed and varied) won't be heard. We've also turned off the Sleep-related chat, so that category's out. Which means that the only category left is food... and that apparently only has one line in it. I propose a vast improvement to the Wagoner chat. At least a dozen more comments on each category, and perhaps some new categories. Some comments will be useful, some observant, some weird. Maybe some rare comments that are more useful, like mentioning some rare recipes? I'm only currently looking at the Witty section (which is typo'ed as "Whitty," by the way), so I'm sure that there's other comments we haven't heard, but the Chat Style is the one section that can't be randomized, so the only way to hear other comments for each section is to manually go over and change Style. My wife and I are writers; we can come up with a barrage of comments to add to the system to keep the Wagoner owners from getting bored and just turning it all off. But we need to know 1.) whether the Devs would be interested in this, and 2.) whether the players would care. What do you think?