Zyrxae

This is the most interesting part here to me: new spells >> new ways to cast existing ones. A book of 'novelty magic' sounds flavorful.

It always seemed strange to me that those with a strong affinity to a land wouldn't be able to use that link to force out those lacking those ties. It seems fitting that through a sufficient exertion of will, people very rooted in a land could push around outsiders drifting/tumbling through. Concept- and balance-wise, I'd suggest that if a single person cleanse-wins against an outlander, the outlander would be movelocked relatively briefly, and that if X players win vs outlander, that outlander would be pushed back X-1 scenes (two defenders—>pushed back one scene, etc) and movelocked for a length of time corresponding to the number of players fighting the outlander...but also that the outlanders, once attempted to be cleansed, could use fight causes (advancelr? entergg?) to gain ground against defenders in much the same way, but movelocking the defenders instead of pushing them backwards. (It just doesn't seem plausible for the outlanders to be able to push others around on their homeland.) @Miq [log="Land Cleanser"]An enchanted device capable of pushing marked individuals outside of a land, along designated pathways (known as heat veins). If the cause is won, the target can be pushed towards the land exit one scene. If the fight is lost, the target gets movelocked in place for 60sec per fight. This item is ideal when you need to defend a land from invaders. Action code: fightcause#Fightfor=landguard;Effect_won=pushout;Effect_lost=movelock;Power_won=1;Power_lost=60;Minpeople=2;Maxpeople=10;Duration=2000;Amplif=1; Max Uses: 30 Recharge rate: ~0sec When consumed: returntogroup Transferable: Yes Group: [land] Land Loyalty Required: [land]: 170 Skills Required: No Other Skills Required[/log] No one, I don't mean this as an offense against you or anyone else in particular. It's your choice whether or not to use cleansers against those who walk your turf. Yes, we all have personal interests that can be almost impossible to set aside, but luckily nobody needs to/should set those aside entirely. This suggestion's based off my perception of what fits with preexisting concepts, and the idea that some inter-land scuffles might liven things up in interesting and MD-wise realistic directions.

I like that nadrolski is seeking an in-game solution to his problems rather than just calling people bullies, which doesn't help anything but does piss off/alienate people. Land cleansers were originally made in the era of torch competitions, during which every movement on enemy land while holding a torch would sap all a player's AP, functionally movelocking them until the regen. Adding a movelock effect to the land cleanser now would bring it more into line with its earlier intended effect. Rophs, to go along with your zany metaphor—if the person attempting to bump back the crazed shopper can beat them in a fight, why shouldn't the runner-amok get knocked out? Teamwork is a nice idea, but shouldn't be necessary—one willful citizen should be able to make an effective stand. How about increasing the duration of the movelock the more citizens join the fight? You're thinking about your own good, certainly, but not only. And there's nothing particularly wrong about advocating for something that will benefit yourself and your friends (but other players, too) at cost to your 'enemies'. Everyone's free to disagree for whatever reasons they choose.

Sorry to have dropped the ball on this. I worked with a group on this, but we had to use Invisionzone's five-day free trials and switch email addresses each time. Eventually it became such a hassle what with people being busy IRL and there being hundreds of colors and none of us being real web designers and the spacing of the sylesheet being so close to impenetrable that the best way to change a specific color turned out to be eyedroppering its hex value, searching for that in the doc, and pasting in its place the hex of a swatch from the palette we'd assembled in Photoshop. Not to mention the raging disagreements about color schemes.. Not to put anyone off, but it's good to know what you're up against. I made this demo just now, so it's good for another five days. The current stylesheet from our forum is uploaded there, ready to work with. Anyone interested can request adminship and get access to the stylesheets. Chew, if you give the okay I'll post the CSS files you sent us here for anyone to try for themselves. I'd be willing to work in a team, but doing it alone is just too daunting right now.

Someone somewhere had time.. Reputation Time addon: "With this simple hook you can check when reputation point was given ( in topic view )." Possible extra bonus: reason "Hook give you the ability to attach a short message when you give a reputation point."

coughcoughcough..!

Might it be possible to get uv('land_loyalty')? Hopefully it could be an array (rather than just the loyalty value with your current land), able to output something like land 1: 210 land 2: 0 land 3: 46 etc

Maybe an "are you sure you want to discard?" warning if you have text typed in the open pop-up and/or some sort of auto-save for half-written messages like in email/forum?

Tom, you raise valid points. Neither; it's for encouraging people to a) realize that they do care about things and b) get others to care about those same things enough to effect non-stagnation in MD. Both; people with personal goals often need help to reach those goals, making community projects. This a big part of why I asked about this. Fyrd—no offense meant to him—has tried for a while to organize the community to various ends, but most of these projects fell short of his and others' hopes. Several people here have mentioned efforts they've made that haven't succeeded. But failure's educational: the better we understand why past efforts didn't succeed, the better we can plan for future successes. I'd like to see some protectors with targeted agendas. People who wield as much (literal) heat as they do should have more influence on the realm than most protectors seem to exert currently. This is what this topic is for. Something I heard once: "It doesn't matter what direction a fish swims so much as that it swims away from where it is right now." For us, it doesn't matter exactly what our goals are so much as that we work towards something/some things that we find meaningful and believe will enrich someone's (maybe just their own; that's fine, too) experience here. There's no shortage of possible goals that would make MD better if people chose to chase them. Apathy—going through your day without heading anywhere in particular—is our greatest enemy. Many people don't seem to see this as a problem. To these people I would ask: What do you think is the problem, if not apathy?

Who does this arrangement benefit? People would be left waiting months to be able to switch..better to just prevent heat donations to people who can't be constructive with that heat. Similar things have been suggested before, but why not have the number of adepts needed to become protector be a certain percentage of the number of players active in the realm each day?

Nothing wrong with the posts above, but for clarification's sake, examples of things people have done/attempted to work towards in the past, in no particular order: Zleiphneir & co. guarding Bob The dojo/the sparring grounds The creation and 3(+?) attempts at return of the Children of the Eclipse Fire Starter's Cloud & chawan MD University A bit broad, but still fitting The GGG, whatever you think of it Many people's independent or interdependent research efforts (Bootes, Shadowseeker, Rendril..too many to name) Rumi and now Menhir: Community Garden Innocence: MD-Archives leadership tankfans/The Warrior seeking to fix the Oak Fort Cryxus' pirate crew Eon's rise to power Samon seeking to become an alchemist Various incarnations of Story Night No one's resource mastery Grido/Akasha/other Golemians having wanted to fix the Ivory lighthouse Those who would become the Seekers of Enlightenment contacting the angiens and certainly the Adventure Log. Some of these fell short of what their originators had hoped for them, but others have left a lasting legacy. Who out there is standing in the wings? Maybe a forum topic feels like the wrong place for this, but then maybe not. If this topic ends up as a rhetorical question to you all, I suppose that's okay, too. -- Edit because apparently this isn't coming across: This isn't some out-of-the-blue Question of the Day!! thing; it's very relevant to the recent discussions of fairness and favoritism. We should be able to prove ourselves in the eyes of enough of the community to lessen accusations of unfair privileges granted. (Personally, I've rarely disagreed with Mur's recent selection of so-called favorites whose names I know, but since transparency seems to be such a sticking point for others, it's another why-not-post reason here.) People get selected for things Mur/Council base their decisions of who gets what on the potential people show/what people have done already, respectively, somewhat. Each method has flaws: rewarding people for their potential rather than their achievements to date does not necessarily encourage follow-through on those people's part, but only rewarding people who meet certain inscrutable criteria leaves the less than highly motivated among us feeling like our actions don't really affect the world. Whatever happened to enjoying the process of working with others toward a common goal with lasting effects on the whole realm?

What are some specific in-realm goals of yours, things you'd like to make happen but for whatever reason haven't taken shape yet in-game? Big or small, personal or alliance/land-centered or cubal. Preferably more concrete (not necessarily this concrete, though they certainly could be) than abstract—things you could see rather than just feel. The question is meant as akin to a cross between this topic and this one: MD-based like Chew's, but—unlike that topic, which ended up with mostly whole-game suggestions that will take significant time and effort to balance—things here are meant to be at least loosely based on a specific person or group ("based on" ≠ "limited to"; AL events were based around certain people but preferably not limited to only involving a set group) and closer to being partially (but by no means necessarily completely) feasible by a dedicated person or group of non-coders. Another way to put it: where would you like to take your part of MD?

Land score is public? You hoover over the [?] next to loyalty? Or am i missing something? Just wondering: what's the reasoning behind (land and regular) loyalty not being on our public profiles along with our other stats? As for Change's proposition, it might make things interesting in that lands' historic/current tensions could be seen in the net of who's allowed to be a double citizen in whose land. The main people I see as benefiting from this would be emissaries like certain Legend Speakers were to the main lands, but maybe if political tensions heat up more this could make things interesting. I'd favor a system wherein you get a loyalty point for each land you're a member of every [# of lands you're a citizen of] days over the proposed system, though.

Zyrxae 183229 795 Average age of participants: about 2 years

Tell them it doesn't need to be perfect or completely laid-out from the start and that coming back to something after a while can make it better than it seemed like it would have been at first.

The info here probably won't help much, but maybe it could be useful for organizing gathered information, who knows. If this happens over the weekend I'll fill in for darkraptor (MDA), otherwise he's free to do this.

"Clickable inactivity notification" is available under options, unless you're saying that it still sends those messages even with the box unchecked. How is reading an emailed message and deleting that same message before reading it in-game effectively different from opening a PM, quickly copying its contents into a text editor, hitting "read later" on the PM, and then deleting it?* Both allow the intended recipient to read the message without the receiver believing it has been read; the latter just has slightly more potential for human error. I'm for pms to email because it simplifies what I do anyway. If this does get worked on soon, I'd also like to ask about the line breaks not showing up in emailed PMs, at least in Gmail and Yahoo. (000A being converted into 0020, just for you Chew) *Of course I've never done this.. EDIT: everyone's and DD's concern is valid, although I'd always seen this as more of a fun feature than an issue needing solving. If it comes down to it, though, the waiting period's fine by me.

People are less inclined to participate in what appears to be a single-winner contest that rewards only those able to stay online and caffeinated for a week straight than try out a friendly challenge that rewards both serious and casual players. Currently people wait their way out of MD entirely for their chance at the only trophy they consider worth fighting for. Raise the rewards for second, third, and fourth place relative to the reward for first place, both credit- and stat-wise. (50/40/30/20 credits for 1st/2nd/3rd/4th, to toss something in?) And might it be time for scaled stat rewards—the higher you place, the greater % of your current stats you gain as reward? That could lead people to hold out on competing until they have high enough stats, like how people wait to buy the permanent boosters in the shop—more incentive to train, but never quite feeling 'ready'. Thoughts, maybe especially from those who haven't yet won?

Thank you, Nimrodel, your words touch me in returning. In all honesty I feel more than a little funny accepting the wishpoint, maybe most of all because it feels like it makes the submission less genuine or more "commercial" (no insult to Nimrodel or others)...but then again this wouldn't have been finished, let alone made public had it not been for this topic. Disputing the reward would look (and probably would be) insincerely self-sacrificing and childishly attention-seeking and rude to Nimrodel, whose generosity should be rewarded, not punished. To that end: No idea if this is still happening or if the TKs are the only deciders here, but I'd like to nominate this topic for a wishpoint. (Nim, I'd give you one right now, but no bets how long you could keep it..!) Correlation's twitchy eyebrows be damned, the hate has simmered down since this topic was started and improved by each contributor. I think that deserves at least as much recognition as any one entry. EDIT for posterity's sake: The TKs gave Nim her well-deserved wishpoint.

"Tag! I'm still It!" My favorite part. I like to believe that Eon would remember these: Liberty: if one were to invade loreroot which would be the best course of action to conquer it? Eon: If someone was going to attempt to take over Loreroot, the best way to do it would be to teleport everyone inside to the lighthouse in GG. The person would then march their army inside. Eon: They would make sure I was on their side and station me at the front entrance to slow people down who try to take it back. Eon: They would load up with killing items beforehand and kill off anyone who tried to fight back. Eon: That's the best way Eon: You completely clear loreroot out in the beginning, and then kill off anyone who tried to get it back. Eon: Not up for debate Liberty: correct answer was Liberty: .......... Liberty: burn down the forest http://oracleofbacon.org/ 0111001010000100010000101 1100101101 = #E50885 32D Coincidence? No way.. In all seriousness, Eon had a unique perspective on his place in MD, without which he couldn't have gotten where he did. Say what you will about however else he reached his goals, he was an expert on quiet power. He approached situations as logical problems, but there was something elegant about his solutions that went straightforward into something more than plain answers. He made rules into shields and weapons as only the best lawyers/accountants know how. He was excellent with metadata: second only to dst (who to be fair has several years on him, and counting) at using information about quests' organizers/judges to determine his course within those quests. He understood not only the system but the actions if not always the motivations of the people who made it work. In his own dotty way, he was exceptionally Good At MagicDuel. I miss him.

Challenge accepted. It ends up being something like "the longer you stick around and talk, the more opportunity people have to form an opinion of you one way or another". (The graphs and simple regressions will get their own topic in due time..) — Meanwhile, this has been up for a good while and the majority opinion received more than half the votes. Based on this poll, I recommend that the forum switch to a system of transparent positive and negative reputation. — Final tally: "Like" system (current) (4 votes [10.26%]) Positive and negative, transparent rep (22 votes [56.41%]) Positive only, transparent rep (0 votes [0.00%]) Negative only, transparent rep (1 votes [2.56%]) Positive and negative, opaque (what we used to have) (7 votes [17.95%]) Positive only, opaque (1 votes [2.56%]) Negative only, opaque (0 votes [0.00%]) No reputation system at all (4 votes [10.26%])

[log='Principle of Transposition'] You said if a man sits in place long enough, with enough will and water he will turn into a tree, and so you did. You showed me how the man who gave you limbs was really just a man, and I shouldn’t worship him for doing what we all do naturally, just with a healthy dose of charisma. I said (wanted to believe that) charisma can make all the difference. You essayed to write a poem a day, and sent me them for a while. One was second person and I thought it was for me. You said Not so. I say Forer effect, and the molding of ideas to fit their containers, how they stiffen when the heat fades. You said you read Coriolanus that night and so I stole it from the place with short ceilings and never gave it back, despite going back a couple months back. I still haven’t read it, like everything else, but I intend to. Intention is a little. Death you once called a fur about your neck, in which I saw a grandmother’s whole mink slung with eyes for exes, that you hadn’t seen. Your scent is apt: spring, all potential: the wind through this window. Your light is the morning highway with Photoshopped black & gainsboro birds and the Pretenders. We fought our separate clichés and hashed them down together. Who started it doesn’t matter, just how we finish them off put them down stop this once and for— It’s no use, they’ll always be around the corner, crouched. But we can wait there, too. I read you 2 October '10, and you said it was very like its author, which was true. It was very him. Mur exudes himself, but who doesn't? Our words are fingerprints, and some of us just can't wait to make our mark on the panes. You once told me we had our own language. As always, your words speak truer than mine. Where mine are halting and just a smidgen over the top in places you are smooth and piquing and a subtle breakthrough. Where I can’t but speak formalese, you ringed circles around my prose and called me the tern—the winderwild—that stopped at only the ionosphere, when it's too late to turn back and the wax is coming undone. Late one day in the summer I lay on my father’s bed and the circle and its void point came to me. 
I told you but you were taken by other things. Like Sanskrit, this idea iterates variedly: - One needs three points to define a specific circle and a fourth point to complete that circle. - Two qualities, graphed, mapped into two dimensions, is 22, is four points. (23::R3::sphere, and so on out to Riemann.) - Numbers are defined, encircled by void—we stop counting because there is no more to count without retracing the circle. - Humans achieve self-actualization through creating something greater than themselves. - Whenever an attempt is made to close a system, a leak will appear that leads into a larger system. This is the smaller system’s point of void. I pɔərd over waves and sines. You thought I meant signs of hello/goodbye, and so they became. You asked me in anger how I twisted backwards and fit through the needle’s eye. Your words, not mine. I said: With {among other things} splitting and headphones and a flashlight and matches and the admiration of small children and fossils and big rain and the kick of a cat and a slew and a spate and spats and the same thing over and over and less rain now and bicycle rage and plodding and plotting and hating and waiting and time. The friend who showed me Richard Siken says this reminds her of him, and since I consider you like him (ENFP), that fits. I showed her once your ballerina and my fields and asked which was whose. She got it right, but it took a while. Your longest, best friend here I never got to know and she always seemed tired and a little confused but with reason to be—as though she’d spent a hard day trying and just needed a rest is all. Maybe it was the lowercase. She gave me Nina Simone, you Here We Go Magic and don't take my life away. Portrait: the overlaying of several roads into the sun with power towers reflected on asphalt that aches to end with the sidewalk. We once decided your job was to make me uncomfortable like the sculpture that can’t stay settled and so keeps moving until it finds a place to stay, whereupon it dies, sharkic. I get your jokes. Just now I reread what I had written you as advice and thought you wrote it to me. This is why I never put names on these records: so that one day this might happen and I could be as good as you were when we first met. As I reread this happens more and more, but maybe I just want to believe you rubbed off on me. Your once- (still?) friend introduced himself to me at the foot of your less-animate rival and from there we went to sea. I spent forty hours sleepless to see what it was like, because he said that sixty was when the voices came. He once tried to go crazy and stopped because it was working too well. You said you were crazy and that was the only way to be, because the world was. I agree that the best people are worse off sane. Bards, he said, stole all the girls with their pretty talk. But it’s not nearly so much glurgey flowers as emotion tied into the syllables. By all definitions of “bard”, you’re one. I winced away three nights in inverted chutes drawing I had no clue what, but definitely for you. You didn’t know what to verb preposition it but could look at it for a while, which is fair and was all I asked or expected. Its sun just hung there while people flowed. Once you thought I’d mastered something of yours, and it was an honor. “Verb preposition” resembles that style, and that will have to do because copying straight is out of the question. There's something about copying exactly that just doesn't feel right, like recorded music: the same each time, not fitted differently for each audience, one exact sequence of bits or pock-marks of sound—broken-up waves. I [don’t][didn't] have to tell you how I feel for you to know, and that[’s][was] huge. You can't stand people who aren't, who pack their emotions like suits into waterproof gutproof resealables overhead—Either they irk you or I impose my own views on you, or somewhere along that scale. More and more you’ve resigned yourself to the body and its bounds, or so I believed. You sent me flowers of glass with a baby in a carriage and you on the too-green lawn with the hose to nowhere that ended with your grandmother sipping carrot juice and shattering a daylily whose perfumed center hadn’t quite yet worn away. It stopped at an absurd poem, which elided perfectly because the whole thing was way oversaturated, but then sometimes life is too colored, too. You insisted that things came in fours and wouldn’t explain why, but I couldn't let that go. You've been called the transposition master. I agreed, because you more than maybe anyone else have transformed me into someone who could speak (sometimes), and movingly. But I wonder if it’s like a spell cast by a witch who’s killed: the glamour fades until a toad is just a toad once more. In that sense, this is a plea. {Xxxx xxxxxx xxxx} and I didn’t know what to say, so we didn’t, and we haven’t since.[/log]

Bump, now that Forum Death Quest submissions are done. Since there's such a clear majority so far, this will close in 2 days.

[log='Zyrxae's entry']Like the room in the Wooden Box, this small realm is one of the mind. My actions within it are metaphors, but this makes them no less real; indeed it makes them more so. The light is present so that I may see, and so that the shadows are not impotent. (There are no shades without light for comparison.) I can’t find its source because it emanates evenly from the room itself; this implies that no particular part of the room is spotlighted or innately deserving of my attention. The door and its handle together are described as ominous, scarred, disfigured, heavy, blackened, and tarnished. I would beware it for now, as I would any entity bearing these characteristics. “The mirror on the wall holds your reflection, not as you would see with your eyes.” Your reflection, not as you would see with your eyes…how else to see but with that part of the mind we call the heart? This second reflection of mine, then, reflects my own interior. I hesitate in comparing this quality to shades: though such an analogy may be appropriate here, so many others have made it before me and I feel their manner was crass and disrespectful toward the reality of “personal darkness”. It’s one thing to talk about such things and quite another to live them. That said, certain things can be known about shades. "He who fights monsters must take care lest he become a monster"—so the quote goes, and while shades are not "monsters" per se, they share their ability to induce fear and the notion that those who battle them are ultimately on their side. The Adventure Log's notion of "shades in Marind Bell" reflects this aspect. The script in the mirror says something to the tune of "The truth in the mirror is the hardest to hear". This seems as trite as it sounds, and yet it holds some truth: those truths which resonate deepest within us—those that deal with our own faults and frailties—are also those that we often prefer not to acknowledge. With this in mind I reexamine the door. Yes, it appears imposing, but it is also my only apparent exit from this place. But first I must deal with that which flits at the edge of my vision… For a moment I consider keeping my back to the walls and floor so as to eliminate my blind spot. But under no conditions does anyone lack a blind spot; besides, this is an entity of shadow and metaphor, not one bound to the laws of physical space. I opt for honesty and reconsider. If the mirror shows my true reflection, it should also show the true reflection of the thing I can’t look at directly. Like an optical (or other) illusion, the more I look at it, the more it goes away…so I remain facing, eyeing the mirror’s reflection of the flitting shadow and the door itself as I turn the key in the lock and exit through the door.[/log] Didn't receive a score (did ask). Thanks to Amber for starting this, and to those who've consented/posted their submissions. These are all fairly similar at first glance (do enclosed crowds such as that in the tunnel correlate with pressure to conform?)..but any serious analysis should probably wait until more of these are in. Speaking of pressure, apparently some others sent in entries and also didn't get scores; maybe they could also be included in the title post.