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January Office Hours Highlights

Posted by Kim on January 13, 2022, 9:00am

Didn't manage to make it when it was live? Here's some highlight Q&A from my Office Hours this weekend. :)

So, um, what flavor cake will we get for Epic week in April?
That is a great question!! I don't know yet!! Darth and I were just talking about how we need to firm up our plans for the epic week plot and get building pronto. >.>

Kim... is there a way we could have Fantasy / General / Sci-Fi forums (public) for adults only???
I don't currently have plans to have adults only RP forums. I spend enough time grabbing people by the collar and reminding them that the fact that the LFRP-AO board is adults only doesn't mean it's for explicit sexual content. I can't imagine adding more adults only spaces in public would help with that misconception.

It would be cool to do something specific like a site-wide event like the masquerade to encourage more characters and roleplays in the sci-fi forum
The spring masquerade is meant to change theme/genres every time, so there's a very high liklihood we'll see a sci-fi one. The Spring masquerade will be happening in March, prrrrrrrrrobably on the 19th? Last time it was super hero themed. I've been going back and forth between cyber-punk or a more... space-stationy style setting for it :)

I need to know more about this 'Epic Week!
Epic Week is our annual celebration of the site's birthday... I usually create some games, ranging from puzzles to figure out to recently full on little pixel RPG/farming simulators XD Everything is built to promote teamwork, and the whole site works together to move the plot along and unlock rewards :) There's a lot of info here: https://www.rprepository.com/help/epic-week

is the ability to set characters profiles to friends only coming?
I hit some choppy waters on that feature. I keep running into issues with, if a character is anon, how will it even gain friends to begin with? Maybe it can be the one to initiate a friends request, but then does the other person not get to see the profile before they accept the request? What if the other character is also in friends only mode? Are they just adrift in the void forever?

My assumption and impression of the feature was that it would be tied to the player account friends, and 'friends only' being that we can choose for only the people we are player-friends with to see specific characters of ours.

Riiiight, but your player-account friends aren't generally shown your anon characters. Your anon characters remain anon even from people you have listed as friends. This is very straight forward for characters publicly linked to their players but I keep running into things that would be less than intuitive with anon characters.

The workaround I've been thinking about for friends only profiles is that if an anon character sent one of YOUR characters a relationship request, maybe it would work like top secret groups - if they invite you, you have a temporary pass to view the group despite it being top secret, so you can decide whether to join or not. We could do that with anon friends-only characters too, so long as the OTHER character they were initiating the request with wasn't also friends only.

Oh! I remember one worth bringing up. The ability to give a character you create to someone else's account. I can think of a few reasons for that

Oh, this one is easy: No, never. :) It creates the potential for some really gnarly social situations. Imagine you have cultivated a friendship with someone via their anon character X. You tell them intimate details about your life. The next week you go to send them another message about some personal troubles you are dealing with, not realizing you are now talking to a completely different person.

Another scenario: You run a group that accepts characters. You block player A from your group. Player B joins your group with character C. Not realizing there was a previous problem with Player A, they agree to sell their character C to them. Now A is back in your group. Maybe they weren't even blocked, they just weren't the person you approved to join.

I think there could be a non-dangerous application for creating some kind of system where you can allow someone else temporary access to editing your character for you, if you needed help with BBcode or something. Obviously, under NO CIRCUMSTANCES would it be something that could happen without permission. XD. That would prevent horrible cases of mistaken identity at the least.

Or more pre-sets beyond just what the character wizard offers might help to meet the problem of people wanting help/suggestions for how to lay out a character profile.

I also think it would be a good idea to give someone that understands the website. Say a newbie needs help and doesn't know what there doing what if a person like someone whose been here a long time, what if we could put them in contact with that person for help? Say having a list of people willing to help instead of the newbie going to the help forums and struggling to find it. I was there once, I only figured it out after talking to a person who helped me. Is there a way to do that? Kinda like a greeter. I know it's a rocky idea but I think it would be a good one.
Last I checked, most of the introduction topics that newbies post have tons of people offering up helpful links and offering to answer any question the person has, and questions in the help forum get answered pretty quick... I'm not sure what creating a list of people to PM instead of having people ask in the help forum (or type their question into the search bar - it works pretty often!) would offer much more speed than finding someone one of those ways?

i was just wondering if there was a way to make it less overwhelming if that makes sense

Making this giant site less overwhelming is a constant conundrum! I have yet to find a perfect solution >.>

Is this year's Epic Week going to be a lot more mellow, or do you have big plans you're hiding away again?
Oh crap called out XD So Darth and I have been talking this week about exactly how we want to theme it and how big we want to go with it. Nothing is confirmed quite yet but... Let's just say I have some map and avatar related ambitions for the year and going ham on Epic Week maps might be a nice spring board for that over-arching goal? XD This year, this year I am determined at least to not let the games get so out of hand that it takes me until December to release the character styles >.>

Any more thoughts on the low contrast display settings? I noticed it was still experimental.
Good question. I think there are areas where the low contrast is not happening like it should, especially around text areas. I admit I've been quite slow on that because my eyes are happiest with very high contrast, and they start to water when I go to work on/test the low contrast one.

Comments

Arekkusu

January 13, 2022
9:33am

On the subject of helping newbies: I always give a list of links to newcomers to help them find their way around the site. It doesn't cover everything, but should give them a pretty stable foundation for getting started on most things they will need here. It's up to the individual to actually read through the roadmap I try to provide them though. Outside of that, the help forum is there for more specific scenarios that don't come up often.

Creating a list of "helpful people" just seems unnecessary. Between the help forum and moderators, it doesn't make sense to have other members be designated helpers.