Kafuuka

[quote name='Fenrir Greycloth' date='18 July 2009 - 05:32 PM' timestamp='1247931150' post='37405'] Something does need to change with these quests. I had a quest that was completed by three people on my hate page. The quest was to write me an essay on the behavioral patterns of knators, or the social hierarchy of the knators. Perhaps this quest was to hard for most people or noone knew about it. I think that more people should have the ability to makes quests, not reward them, but to have a quest page. In order to get the quest activated the player needs to get the quest approved by an rpc. This will allow many more quests, and a way to control the quality that comes from them. [/quote] There are a lot of quests that few people know about. Every now and then I 'hunt' for quests to do and read hatelists and quest pages to see if there's anything new, but I never noticed yours. It would be a bit easier if everybody got a quest paper and it would finally allow me to stop using the hate paper for quests. I do not think there should be a manual verification of who gets the paper and who doesn't. If there is a need for distinction, it can easily be done by changing the color of the quest paper icon. There's brown and gold icons and it should be possible to code that non RPCs get a brown quest document icon and RPCs get a gold one. And if for some reason you need more levels, silver seems like a logical third color. In the past there were attempts at listing all available quests on the forum, but it doesn't seem to work. Perhaps this should be automated as well. If everybody has a quest paper, it should be possible to keep a log of when that page was last edited and make that list available somewhere in the game. Of course there should be an option to make small edits would getting to the top of the list, but that is but a matter of making a check box for small/big edits. Maybe an option to have a comment next to the edit date too, svn style. [quote name='Harion' date='19 July 2009 - 09:29 AM' timestamp='1247988577' post='37456'] yes! 15 players that will be sought after! 15 players that may make or break the quest. that's exactly what I'm talking about. too much power given out to players that could make or break the game. hey, this 15 people can do ask anything they want from other players just to grant knowledge of those letters. seriously, can i play this game without being ultimate slaves to other players? like what do i need to do to get that quest? [/quote] There are nice and power crazy people, good and bad quests. It is your choice to try a quest or to ignore it. Of course it is annoying to be unable to even begin a quest, but this will happen to other people too. A lot of quests reward the first player to solve it. Sometimes they get solved before you are online to read the description... You can still solve it for fun, without the reward. Perhaps you can laugh at the 'chosen' people when they are having a hard time. eg Marvolo's current quest is a very nice game theory experiment. [quote name='Burns' date='19 July 2009 - 10:32 AM' timestamp='1247992330' post='37459'] there is no goal, there is no high-score, there is no 'end of game' you can reach... and personally, i don't see where hardcoded ladder-quests would take the game to, now it's never ending, but what happens if you are on top of the ladder-thingie? 'Congrats, you beat the game and wasted 267 days of your life!'? or do you then go on with the RPC-quests until you beat them all? [/quote] I think the use of more ladder-quests is to keep people occupied long enough for them to understand that there is no goal. How many games are there that don't have a goal? The only ones that come to mind are dwarf fortress and all the sim and tycoon things. It can take a bit of time to adapt. PS dwarf fortress is cool, but even though the ascii art is outdated it still manages to slow down on a dual core once you get a decent amount of livestock

[quote name='Harion' date='18 July 2009 - 08:44 AM' timestamp='1247899441' post='37375'] there has to be a way to keep the hardcore MD players happy and yet still keep average gamers playing perhaps an easy setting for those who want it? i've been wondering why there are no non-char NPCs that give out easy quests (that doesn't expire!) so that it'll at least give some players the feeling of progressing in the game instead of being stalled when they can't get over certain parts of the game[/quote] There's 6 billion people on the planet, even if only one percent of them would be interested in MD, that would still crash the server. Sometimes bigger isn't better and I don't think making an 'easy setting' would work. People are already tempted often enough to cheat, use loopholes, alts, blatantly ask for solutions to quests that have high rewards. I don't mind giving people a hint but giving the answer... There already are a couple of ongoing or periodic quests/puzzles/competitions. The Berserker puzzle, broken pattern, Loreroot guards. The heads contest. The torch competition is being tested. And some new ones have been mentioned on the challenges pages for a long time, so hopefully they will one day be available and give new people more options on things to do or look forward too. And then there is the whole factions thing, which is aimed at integrating new players faster too. If I remember correct it is to encourage small non-temporary quests with small but tangible rewards, giving players a lot of things to do. (until they have done all the new static quests and are stuck with the non static ones again) [quote name='awiiya' date='18 July 2009 - 10:31 AM' timestamp='1247905871' post='37379'] I think you overdo it on the "exclusive" part. I think MD is exclusive only because it takes a smart person to play this game. Well, play this game and succeed, I should say. The veterans that I know (because to some degree I consider myself a veteran) are all intelligent people, and have earned their place in this game.[/quote] Patience is perhaps the most important skill in MD. Obvious examples are creature age and not leaving an area ten seconds after you type 'hello' because no one answered yet. Maybe you have to be smart to notice that this game is played at a different pace than most games and then you have to decide whether you have enough patience and want to be 'hardcore' or go back to fast paced action. Maybe you have to be smart to be patient? I have to admit I have little patience for the impatient and I don't mind this kind of selection at all. Though it would be wonderful if MD could teach patience before people give up and I think that in a some cases it does.

[quote name='Shadowseeker' date='15 July 2009 - 05:00 PM' timestamp='1247670012' post='37139'] As for the quest, I see...people wish interactivity (which means endless work though), which I cannot afford seeing I have no way (or had, until the RPC changes are done) to make everything automatically. It was meant to be a fair quest, and I by myself would tend to give people I like better events and those I dislike more negative ones...hence how it turned out.[/quote] Getting random events is indeed fair. The interactivity problem lies more in getting random results after we decide on an action, enhanced by having no idea about the odds - The stew is a lie! - and not that many actions to choose from. Although there was a riddle, but I managed to fail that one epically Aside automation, collaboration would reduce the workload too. I don't know what the limits of rpc tools are, but rpc tools aren't the only method. They're probably easier to use than writing c++ code, but whatever they gain in simplicity, they loose again when trying complex things that they weren't designed for. If they are fit for this sort of quest, then the difficulty in writing should be similar to using python or some other script language.

It was quite random to me. I'd hoped that finding more pieces of the map would stop me from walking in circles and getting offered nauseating stew, but I never got there. It was a bit disappointing to read that it'd end before that. Overall I think you're quite insane to do this without any automation.

[quote name='dst' date='14 July 2009 - 11:33 AM' timestamp='1247564027' post='36991'] Toy soldier? Plastic? In MD? O_O WE haven't even invented hot water or the wheal in MD,yet you want plastic? I didn't even read more. So I suggest as a start a complete change of names. [/quote] We've got coffee, last I checked that required hot water. And there's wheels and gears too, but no plastic. Maybe a tin soldier? Tin hasn't got that high a melting point, you can melt it with an open flame, whereas steel and other materials can require complicated forges. Bronze, wood, stone...

[quote name='Muratus del Mur' date='13 July 2009 - 01:12 PM' timestamp='1247483562' post='36922'] There is a possibility that there will be one wp given out by solving a quest, the broken pattern quest. Currently i am rewarding it with a wp but its slow and i miss to reward some that did solve it, so i think to make it automaticaly, even if its obvious that most will use the solution to get a wp for their alts too..but its just one afterall (and puzzle could be randomized based on player id ).[/quote] If you can solve the puzzle once, you can solve it again. Randomness only increases the time to solve it. Changing the starting tile would give me a minute of work to get the new solution. Most of the wish shop items mentioned are anything but unique. If you use a wp to get an item for your character, that is something unique and lasting. If you buy 'ten uses of spell x' it is neither lasting, nor unlikely that someone else will buy the same spell. I'd like the option to spend a wp on an actual wish: you write down what you wish for, pay one or more wp and it gets reviewed. No guarantees that it will come true, or if it is granted, that it is like you wanted: your wish might be impossible, or interpreted wrong. (eg If you wish to be undefeatable in combat, you might become unable to participate in combat altogether, hence nobody can defeat you.) It would be a manual process, but how many people have wish points and are willing to take the risk? I'm certain there are lots of people that have unique wishes though. You can write your wishes in your papers or on the forum, or try spamming mail... none of that has a guarantee it will be read and by spending wish points on it you would once again prove your dedication to your idea.

[quote name='MRD' date='11 July 2009 - 06:49 PM' timestamp='1247330997' post='36779'] I have people i deny rewards to all the time. it happens. [/quote] Why? I can understand that sometimes it does not make sense for a certain character to do a story driven quest. Or that quests are targeted at specific mp levels or active day requirements. Or if people are known to cheat. Depending on the reward you give, it is possible to do the quest with an alt and get the reward. What is the point in denying specific people then?

[quote name='Guybrush Threepwood' date='06 July 2009 - 07:05 PM' timestamp='1246899905' post='36336'] E=MC^2. Einstein was showing that mass and energy are indeed convertible, as you've said. However, though I've never heard this mentioned in any class, I don't believe it's possible to have energy without mass. Those particles you mentioned have kinetic energy because it is mass moving.[/quote] It is possible to have energy without invariant mass: electromagnetic waves have zero invariant mass. (Visible light is nothing but electromagnetic waves with wavelengths within the range we call the visual spectrum.) The way relativity works anything that moves at light speed must have zero invariant mass and cannot be slowed down (in vacuum), while nothing that has an invariant mass greater than zero can be accelerated to the speed of light. [quote name='Grido' date='06 July 2009 - 09:02 PM' timestamp='1246906920' post='36356'] actually just remembered something, and i'm skipping over most of the points here, because well my head is being lazy atm, and my typing fingers hurt. In a complete vacuum, some particle which i cant remember the name of, and it's anti-self appear and then destroy each other, meaning that something can come out of nothing, but just to clarify, and i'm not sure how this works, but the particle can ONLY appear on the condition that it will be annihilated momentarily later, so cant be sustained. [/quote] Quantum mechanics allow the laws of physics to be ignored for times that are smaller than can be detected. (Heisenberg uncertainty formula, which is of the form: delta E * delta t <= Planck's constant) A practical use of this is scanning tunneling microscopy. Subatomic particle physics allows certain conversions of energy into matter and matter into other forms of matter. There a couple of invariants like in chemistry: energy (or mass, using E=mc²), momentum, angular momentum, baryon number, charge, color charge... Using those rules it is possible to list a number of decays that happen in the universe. As an example: a photon (pure energy) of 1,02 MeV can decay into a positron and an electron, which each have an invariant mass of 0,51 MeV. The positron is the anti particle of an electron and has the same amount of electrical charge, yet the opposite polarity. If a positron and an electron meet, they will annihilate and the resulting energy will be converted into photons. At CERN they accelerate positrons and electrons to high velocities, giving them a lot of energy, and then let them collide. If the total of their kinetic energy and the energy from their invariant masses is large enough, particles with higher invariant mass may be created. If you combine both of the above, then it is possible, for a very short time, that invariance of energy is ignored and a positron electron pair is created. Normally both particles are attracted to one another, meet and annihilate again within that short time ( about 4 * 10^-21 s). Such particles are called virtual particles, because they do not exist long enough for anyone to notice. In the vicinity of a black hole, it is possible for one virtual particle to fall into the black hole and the other to continue its existence outside of it, thus becoming a 'real' particle. The black hole can loose mass when anti matter that is created in such a process enters the black hole, and the equivalent mass in matter escapes from its gravitational pull. For an observer it appears as if the black hole is emitting electrons and slowly loosing mass, without any violation of energy/mass conservation. This is Hawkins' Radiation.

[quote name='Burns' date='06 July 2009 - 07:40 AM' timestamp='1246858803' post='36262'] i might be wrong with that, but chaos is [i]per definitionem[/i] not ordered, if i understand the idea of it correctly... chaos does necessarily mean that there is no order you could find, all you could see is the opposite/abscence of order [/quote] In maths, chaos does contain some form of order. Here's a fragment from a syllabus on dynamical systems, about the definition of a chaotic function: "And finally, perhaps somewhat paradoxical, we want there to be a form of regularity hidden behind the chaos" This leads to some weird form of deterministic chaos and nice fractal images. You might argue this is not true chaos, but then what is? Brownian motion is a stochastic process, but given enough molecules, it results in order. The digits of pi are chaotic (afaik) yet we have algorithms to calculate them. If it is possible for a human to see some very complicated order in what originally appeared as chaotic, does it loose its status as being chaotic? Given enough time, is there anything that humans will not be able to make up a system for it? In the beginning there was nothing, in the end there will be nothing. What lies in the middle? These are bold assumptions and the words are ambiguous as mentioned: the beginning of the universe or the beginning of a person? In the beginning of x there was nothing, in the end of x there will be nothing. What lies in the middle? x. In order to talk about x, it has to be somewhere: at the beginning, the middle or the end. Unless x equals nothing, it doesn't exist at the beginning or the end, so it must be in the middle. You can then substitute random words for x, thus mixing logic and ambiguous words. (which is a bad idea of course) It's easy to assume x is the universe: the beginning of the universe, of everything. Then in the middle is the universe, in the middle is everything. But words being words, you could say if everything exists, then things that I can imagine, but are not real, should exist too.

[quote name='Fenrir Greycloth' post='35567' date='Jun 28 2009, 09:22 PM']Both of them are correct. A line is a never ending figure. On a 2d plane, it would appear to be a circle viewed from a 3d perspective.[/quote] And if we were to put the circle on a curved plane (or whatever the English term for that is), we can make it look like a pretzel. I don't think the engineering faculty would like that answer though. Besides the distance and angle to the 2d plane matter a lot too when talking about appearing to be. @Esme: Burns said every shape can resemble cyclicity. This is not the same as being cyclic. It isn't difficult to mirror a spiral. Clockwise becomes counterclockwise or you get something in another plane. While a spiral has cyclic properties it also has properties that change under said transformations...

[spoiler]Since it's for engineering, there's no doubt that it the question is about projective geometry and the answer is a line. Projective geometry is build upon lines that always meet (if necessary at 'infinity'), even if you would usually call them parallel. Hence the paradox. Another way to look at it is by using the curvature ( 1/R ) which is a measure for how bent something is. An infinite radius equals zero curvature. A line is not bent and thus has zero curvature. If you check the dimensionality a line is the only option. A line is not the building block of anything finite. An interval and a point are candidates for building blocks.[/spoiler]

[quote name='Metal Bunny' post='35079' date='Jun 27 2009, 03:04 AM']So try and at least make it look like it makes sense. Roleplay a werewolf? Okay, but please don't roleplay like you are stronger than every mortal human, when that mortal human is a higher mp level, has higher stats, better understanding of rituals and has better creatures. It's like seeing that dude as a ''lvl 80 commoner'' and you are a ''lvl 1 changeling''.[/quote] drifting oftopic but I strongly oppose the idea that mp level, ritual knowledge and stats have anything to do with roleplay. How many 'protectors of the weak' and other paladinlike characters are there in the game? And how many of them sacrifice defenseless creatures on an altar in order to get better stats? [quote]So next time, please don't roleplay as if you can actually eat me. Roleplay that you want to eat me.[/quote] Quoted for truth. (although I think metal bunny would taste awful)

I haven't bought any tokens yet, but since you're gathering support here's my two cents: The problem is caused by counter intuitive behavior of the martyrism ability. If martyrism where changed to work on a percentage base, like steal life does, it would be a lot more intuitive and the problem would be solved. Taking one token from a creature and randomly placing it on another creature implies the randomness of the whole process is gone, since you should be able to keep this up indefinitely. (there is always the chance it would gimp the next creature it appears on, so limiting the amount of redistributions doesn't work). How about a button that strips all tokens from all creatures and randomly redistributes them? The chances of getting all of them on the "right" creatures should be incredibly low. If everybody thinks the above two are silly and nothing else that solves the problem at its roots is implemented, then yes I vote for the option of deleting a token, since that still seems better than being stuck with an "expensive" useless creature.

[quote name='Shantu' post='34631' date='Jun 24 2009, 09:16 PM']Like our race is not overpopulated already.. HIV and such exist to reduce our numbers, as animals can't do it. And I'm sure some of the 6,7 million people will survive to see the work of their ancestors, or to continue it.[/quote] Because of our diverse gene pool, for every disease an amount of people are resistant to it. Some humans survive, otherwise the disease will get extinct after killing it's last host too. Killing humanity is not their purpose anyway, although the high population density is required for them to develop and the result can be a sudden decline in population. For global warming, engineers are already working on backup plans like putting mirrors in orbit around the earth and shield against the sun. Of course if they mess up inches and meters again, we're all doomed. Overpopulation: I don't think the earth is incapable of supporting this many humans, but if everybody were to have the same standard of life as we enjoy and we don't advance our technology and change our production methods... I read some articles stating we should all add insects to our diet, because they are more efficient to grow and are very nutritive, can't see it becoming popular yet, but it's an interesting idea. Save the forest, eat more termites!

Since role playing is about interaction, it is a bit silly to play both your character and his/her children. (or worse the character and the spouse.) Incorporeal? I've always played the game as if my character has a 3d body and the ability to walk in XY directions as well as jump up and down. There was a discussion about MD being flat, but I considered that flat as in a discworld flat, not 2D flat. 9 months is for humans, with the strange creatures and hybrids around, who knows how long it takes for them, if it is even possible to further mix races? And that's not only on a genetic level, for some combinations I'd like people to draw me a picture of how it happens and pay my psychiatric expenses after looking at it. Also after 9 months, for humans, you are stuck with a baby, not a twelve year old trying to live on his own. Although if you believe in the stork story it makes sense, so at least my character doesn't see any problems @Akasha: if for each time someone equates Mur to a god, someone else equates him to poo, is that balance?

[quote name='pamplemousse' post='34629' date='Jun 24 2009, 09:02 PM']First, the time. I chose 04:00 server time (which is 9:00 in the evening for me) as I often see people "awake" then, and it is a good time for myself. However, I understand now that it is very late in the evening for my friends across the pond. Would 2100 be better for the non-American continent? I do not think that holding a Story Night twice a week is a good idea and I highly doubt that everyone will be happy with the day and time, but it is my hope to include the most amount of people.[/quote] How about alternating the time: one week at 21h next at 04h. And posting the logs somewhere. That way more people have the chance to participate and we can still read all of the stories if we want to. [quote]Grammar/spelling-In the interest of understanding I do ask that some effort be made to make the story as clear and readable as possible. I understand that grammar and spelling is not the most fun thing in the world and no one will be judged or critiqued for errors. [i]I do not wish to discourage anyone from participating because of this guideline. [/i] If you need help, or wish to discus this further, please contact me. (On a side note: I am a terrible speller )[/quote] If you prepare a story, how hard is it to run it through a spellchecker or let someone proofread it? In general I don't comment on spelling or grammar, unless I see people making the same mistake often. But now that we are discussing it, I must say that a lot of people who according to their flag have English as their primary language, spell incredibly poor. It's gone so far that I've looked up the difference between lay and lie about 10 times now. People pick up your mistakes and repeat them, spread them like an epidemic. Here's what my dictionary says: to lay is to place something; to lie is to recline

I didn't know, and I don't really care much anymore. I thought it'd be a good idea to establish faith in the MDS and stop people from making "ridiculous" offers for items or creatures. Normally prices are clear if you look at a long history of trades and compare those to the supply and demand. In MD there isn't much information available unless you'd read through the dozens of buy/sell topics and even then I doubt there is much consensus. Right now 11 people have completed this survey... I would've made some fancy bell curves and correlation plots, but with only 11 points of data it's rather meaningless. There are different ways to gather data. The best way would be to log all trades that happen, but that would require a different trade interface. If the marketplace is moved from the forum to something that is easy to index, that would work too, but it would mean yet another separate website and we already have the game, the archives and the forum. MDbuy?

[quote name='Esmerelda' post='34591' date='Jun 24 2009, 02:18 PM']Environment has enough funds given by UN. I stay clean frm my side. Thats what matters. Alerting other people, trying to spread awareness.. for me HIV and swine flu are more urgent matters than the environment.[/quote] Enough funds hah! The UN has a budget of $4.19 billion and half of that is spent on peacekeeping missions. The US spends over $500 billion on military. The UN doesn't have enough funds nor power to regulate the environment and they are slow to take action too. eg The Kyoto treaty is still not ratified by all nations. Not that I believe in global warming, but the measures to reduce CO2 often also reduce toxic waste. And it is generally a good idea to be cautious even if you are not convinced that a catastrophe will happen. And then there's the question where those funds go to. A lot of institutions spend [b]half[/b] of their budget on acquiring funds. A deep rooted problem in bureaucracy, combined with the fact that charity, development and research organizations all have to compete for the ridiculously small amount of money that people are willing to pay. Even if I donate a single euro, I'll get at least 5 thank you letters by mail, written on fancy paper, stamped and sometimes wrapped in plastic. Included is of course a request to donate more. If I don't donate more, they probably used up all I gave them on ink, paper and stamps, which is not why I gave them money... but it's the way things work because even charity bows to the rules of capitalism. Swine flu has killed less people than your average flu so far. With a bit of luck the 'problem' will be solved by next year and we can forget about it, like we did with bird flu.

[quote name='(Zl-eye-f)-nea' post='34464' date='Jun 23 2009, 03:30 PM']I don't want to veer off your subject too far here, but we already live in a plane where time does not exist, and incidentally, perhaps steps would be a better description of the stated concept. The greatest success is the achievement of the goal in the smallest number of steps or increments. I don't agree with it, as that would imply that the greatest success is achieved in the most simple way, but i would think that a more appropriate way of wording whats been said.[/quote] Only when time/number of steps is limited. In the example I gave it was... probably a very poor and misleading example, but in my defense it was close to midnight when I wrote it. It seemed useful to me, in that there is a point where success and failure meet each other and it thus gives an easy way to put a quality or even a quantity on the success or the failure. In other cases time is irrelevant, except that humans have, as far as I know, a limited lifespan and hence a limited amount of steps to actually do, even if they can choose from an infinite amount of different steps.

Time doesn't have to be the most important factor but it was the easiest example I could come up with. There are three regions: success, undecided and failure. If you plan on achieving something, you usually have a set of conditions that allow you to determine success. The difference between failure and undetermined is often difficult to determine, except if you have a clear deadline. The opposite is possible too. If your goal is to keep a secret, the conditions for failure are very simple: having one or more of the people that should not know it find out the secret. But when are you successful? If you managed to keep it until you died? What if people find it a year after you died? (this is similar to the halting problem [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)[/url] Since we both consider success to be related to change, I don't see how you can have success in a timeless plane. Also, most interesting examples won't be 2D, but include a lot of conditions... alas my drawing skills are quite poor in 2D already and >3D is out of the question anyway.

[quote name='Shadowseeker' post='34330' date='Jun 22 2009, 07:15 PM']Basically success can be represented by an arrow, right? The beginning is where you originate from, the tip is where you end. The success is what happens in between, and depending on what direction it shows to different actions take. Several small arrows form the big one, the smaller ones being the actions taken.[/quote] Often there are different means to achieve an end. There are different arrows that are equal candidates for success. I'd say that success lies in the end. If you look at the sketch below, you can either end in the green or in the red area. Any arrow that ends on the dark green interval is a representative of success. One could say that a success is better if you are more to the left on the interval and that the rightmost dark green dot represents a narrow victory. If you look at it that way, then both the light and the dark blue paths are equally successful. For success it does not matter which path you take. (it'd matter if you asked what is happiness.) Furthermore, if you were to divide the paths into smaller intervals, it is clear that for the dark blue one things are not always going in the right direction. Sometimes you need to take a step backwards before you can advance. You cannot substitute a part of the dark blue line for the light blue line and still end up at the same endpoint. I do agree that success implies change. You have to start outside of the green area and follow any path that ends inside it. Success is also objective in this sense: if you know a persons goals, you can see whether or not he/she attained them. The subjective part is how much you care about those goals and their interaction with different people and their goals. [img]http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/8615/succesm.png[/img]

The Bible wasn't written on a single day either. Most old texts have an even larger oral history before the first written accounts are found and I doubt the Bible is an exception. I consider the Bible to be a mix of events that happened to a group of people and moral tales. If you look at the research about it, there's some interesting stuff about what happened historically, eg Sodom and Gomorra: a volcanic explosion that spewed tons of poisonous sulfur into the air, wiping out the cities in a matter of hours. I've read a part of Herodotos', which is considered early history writing, and it is also full of both fact and fiction. In one story he writes that a Phoenician expedition to sail around Africa observed that the sun changes sides and appears in the north sky, which we now know to be true because the earth is not flat. He also describes how a king of a certain island empire has too much luck (he tries to remove his luck by throwing his most precious ring in a river and then discovers it in the fish he's served for dinner) and is subsequently struck down by the gods. It's been years since I've read it, but I think he had [b]less[/b] doubts and comments on the king's demise than on the sun appearing in the north instead of the south... Bible stories that do not make sense: how about Lot and his daughters? Let's hope that it is not supposed to be an example of how to behave. [quote]Just the simple fact there are many different versions of the bible supports this claim, why would an author rewrite his book 8 different times from 20 different points of view?[/quote] To increase the sales! (according to Where were you last Pluterday - Paul van Herck )

[quote name='King Manu' post='33941' date='Jun 19 2009, 04:31 PM']its enough damage that people see my ideas as answers not as reasons to think more just because i have a huge authority in MD.[/quote] I might be wrong, I am not a native English speaker, but the word lecture can imply authority. Lecture 2. To reprove formally and with authority. [1913 Webster] The words debate, talk and discourse do not have this additional meaning. Especially debate feels more like an invitation to ask questions and speak your own mind. Same thing with "their own on subjects they master." It is possible to translate this a couple of times and arrive at the sentence 'subjects in which they are an authority'. It might be nothing but words, but it in my experience most disputes are about words and not about ideas. Once both parties manage to agree on the words, they usually soon arrive at a consensus or agree to disagree.

[quote name='Kriskah Arcanu' post='33838' date='Jun 18 2009, 05:03 PM']It was a success considering the contest had almost none publicity.[/quote] We did our best to spam the chat. I even saw one of the contestants encourage a friend to enter, so I don't think there was almost no publicity. There is room for improvement, but as time passes it will become something that people look forward to, based on rumors about the previous one. (eg reading the papers of the winners and seeing the trophy picture should increase awareness) [quote]About the score system. I don't see a problems with decimals if you can correct the total sum at the end (I dont know the expression in English, is when you, for example have a result of: 8.6 , that goes to 9.... and 8.4 will remain as 8 )[/quote] It's unconventional to give marks like 8.6 / 10, while giving 86 / 100 is normal. Mathematically there is no difference, but psychologically there is. And none of us expected there would be a tie. I'm still guessing at what the odds are, it's a bit tedious to calculate since the marks are not uniformly distributed. (if they were it would be less than one in a billion chance) [quote]I am not sure about a new contest for veterans, it will have to be very different from the one from the festival, with many categories as well. I sure if it is presented in an original way it could be great.[/quote] What I meant was to use the same rules and format we used now, but change the age requirements. That way nobody could complain about being left out.

[quote name='BrightShield' post='33783' date='Jun 18 2009, 05:55 AM']When I put that line it was my intent to make it sound or look funny for those who know who He-man is. That scene was to show how Berek the Cattleherd is gullible and Shull witty, manipulative and narcissistic. The only reason Shull transformed Berek is because Shull doesnt want a normal looking fella for a bearer (who would if you think you are a thing of perfection? right?). Shull need no power words to transform Berek and Berek's transformation is permanent unlike He-man's. This is my fault for the lack of elaborate explanation in that story (though it was my intent originally to reveal this information to subsequent story)[/quote] I never read He-man so I did not spot the reference. However I did interpret the story correctly. Shull is manipulative when he commands Berek to pick him up and raise him high. Raising your shield high is an act of pride, but in doing so Berek literally places Shull above him. I am pleased to hear that you have the intent to further the story and reveal more information. One comment that was made often while reviewing papers, is that stories tend to focus on what happened before a character stumbled into the realm and say little or nothing about what happened afterward. Two exceptions being the ones that do not come from another realm and those that remember nothing from before. Anyone that reads Kafuuka's papers will notice there isn't much about events before nor after his arrival in it. A lot of information was supposed to be revealed by now, but it is very very easy to get sidetracked or procrastinate and so it was not revealed and thus not incorporated into the papers yet... and that is at 192 active days... Also, if anyone wants to discuss the nature of originality, style, good integration, character balance or roleplay, [topic="4339"]I refer to this thread.[/topic] After all, is there anything truly original? Something that is not influenced by anything previously read or witnessed? Or is it enough to not have been done in MD before, or to have at least 5 different sources of inspiration?