srwuga_mods | Planned changes for UG3

Planned changes for UG3

Here's a list of changes to the rules that we may implement for UG3 (official beta name: SRW Unity). The list is not set in stone, just because a rule is here doesn't mean it will actually make it to the game, or in the form as it is written here.

This is why we want your input. Give us your opinion about the list, and if you think something is missing from the list, then say so as well.

Anon comments are allowed, all comments are screened by default. If you want yours to be visible, set the tag subject to "unscreen".

Planned changes:

1. Activity Check
This comes in several variations
a. Relax the "must write a post/be on a mission" requirement. Posts and missions still count as 5 tags, so if you make a post you only need 15 more tags.
b. Make the activity check bi-monthly (that is, one AC every two months, not two ACs per month!), roughly doubling the required number of tags per AC.
c. Both of the above. That'd mean you need 35 tags every 2 months to make activity, with every post or mission counting as 5 tags.
Why we want to do this: Activity is something that should come naturally to players who are at least decently, well, active. Not something you should have to spend time worrying about.

2. Human-sized character application rules
A human-sized character (whether canon character or OC) needs to check out these three requirements:
I. Must fit thematically in a SRW game, that is a game with regular combat missions where you can expect at least one (and more often than not, both) side of the conflict to employ giant robots. This isn't about whether the character or their canon "is /m/", but characters like Superman or Goku fail this requirement anyway even if they fit the other two.
II. The character must be powerful enough to engage mecha-sized opponents and be able to win. If the enemy is a mook, then defeating them should be relatively easy - just because your character can defeat a big robot after an epic struggle, equivalent of a boss battle (while the same robot would be one-shotted by a Gundam without its pilot breaking a sweat), doesn't mean the character passes.
III. A mirror reflection of the point above, the enemies from the character's canon must be powerful enough to be a credible threat to mecha-sized opponents. Of course there is only so much that mook units can do, but if the most dangerous the canon has to offer is non-super powered humans with human-scale weapons and equipment, then the canon fails. In general it'd be good if the canon had mecha-sized enemies for mecha pilots (which is most of our characters) to fight, as opposed to having exclusively or mostly human-sized foes.
Why we want to do this: We're not opposed to human-sized canons, but we want them to mesh well with a Super Robot Wars game.

3. Original Character application limits
You can have only two OC Lone Canon Warriors (LCW for short - that is, the only character from their own canon). If you have two or more, you won't be forced to drop the extras but you won't be able to app more until that number goes down.
Characters whose canon have already ended or who have no canon missions do not count as LCWs.
Why we want to do this: SRW is about seeing how characters from already established canons (anime, video games, etc) interact with each other. A number of OCs is fine and makes things more interesting, but they cannot drown out non-OCs numerically. Also having too many OCs may turn potential new players away.

4. Lone Canon Warrior active canon limits
If you have two or more LCWs, then only two of them can have canons active at the same time. Others' canons are on hold - no events happen in them until they become active. The characters are still in the game and participate in missions however.
Of course this doesn't apply to characters who have no canon events for one reason or another.
Why we want to do this: To ensure fairness - if one player has 2 characters and another has 6, then the second player's canons (and characters by proxy) receive 3 times the plot importance and attention. Some people may feel hurt by that, or think the game pressures them to app more characters to be relevant even if they are comfortable playing less.

IMPORTANT NOTE to the two above: pressuring other players into app'ing characters to your own canons (to make them non-LCWs so they don't count towards the limits) will be punished severely. Our players should app characters from canons they like and feel like playing, not because they are forced to.

5. How's My Driving posts
We will not make HMDs mandatory but we will encourage players to have them and offer them a way of setting up one if they're not sure how to do it themselves. There will also be a general HMD for how the game itself is run, as well.
Why we want to do this: So people talk more about problematic behaviour of other players, as well as the mods if you think we screwed up somewhere. That way we can all learn from mistakes and create a better game together rather than bottling it all in and becoming frustrated.

6. Story arcs
Technically we had those in UG@ already but they were criminally under-utilized.
Basically we'll ask players to group events in their canons up into arcs, and events (either missions or logs) in a single arc happen close to each other, in terms of timing. By default each seperate event is its own single-event arc - the option for longer arcs is there but no one is forced to use it.
Why we want to do this: Because it makes much better storytelling. Also, criminally underused.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

What is the overall Character LIMIT? Will it remain the same as 6, then 7 with maintained activity for all characters?

Before it comes up; what are the policies on 'power balancing'? Are they primarily at 'mod discretion' as they typically have been?

Will we be discussing any themes employed in the game directly; such as the occasionally discussed 'Base system' I've heard about here and there? Follow up: what would quantify as a 'base'? I intend on apping a person with the resources (canonically) to have a base of his own/out of his house.

There will be a limit of 6 characters per player.

Power levels won't be balanced in any way. Player characters will generally be effective at what they do (read: fighting) and dramatic narrative is more important than hard stats anyway.

The last question is about fluff rather than rules, but have an answer anyway: we plan the player characters to operate out of three-four major bases connected with teleporters, to ensure that there is a place of "home" but also that the surroundings do not get too stale. Picking the best parts of UG1 and UG@, you could say.
If there is a need plot-wise, further teleporters will be installed in other facilities. Also characters can operate from off-base places, of course.

Edited 2013-11-23 23:07 (UTC)

Yes, actually, it was. Which is why I even asked those questions at all! Also Banjou's mansion

There probably won't be a teleporter in Banjou's mansion, but it will be close enough to one of the bases for him to maintain casual contact with the rest of the player characters. He won't count as "off-base/board" in other words.

Edited 2013-11-23 23:44 (UTC)

Ahh, well, it was menat as an offer to use said mansion as a base since... it's a mansion, and Daitarn's hangar is under it; but it's probably THE only facility that can hangar that thing. Anyway, yes, thank you gentle/m/en

I wish there will be more cats.

Well, I am all for the activity changes. I find that, having relatively reactive characters, making up posts is very hard, but I end each months with tags more than to spare. So that would take a lot of pressure off me.

Edited 2013-11-24 10:44 (UTC)

I agree. I like the idea of not having to be on mission or posts for activity.

Edited 2013-11-24 17:00 (UTC)

I'm pretty much in agreement here. It makes it easier than scrambling to spam a character on every other mission, especially ones where they may not fit.

There is a need to point out that missions were never something you're supposed to base your activity on. That's what threads and tags are for - missions are just an extra.

Yeah but with how much posts get related to missions, and how heavy and important missions are to SRW the series, I would think they'd be kind of important to get involved in so you can keep interactions going.

I have a few questions.

Will there be any rules about apping from unfinished canons? I'm thinking of things like Rinne no Lagrange from UG@, and Knights of Sidonia as something that's been suggested for UG3.

Is there anything planned on how to handle some "awkward" canons, like ones with timeskips (e.g. TTGL, Getter Robo depending on the version) or ones where isolation or lack of resources are important (e.g. Macross, Sidonia)?

On the changes in the post:
1: I'm for (a) and not opposed to (b). I also think it's important to recognize that just because missions may not be required for AC doesn't mean that not participating in them isn't often very awkward IC, and it'd be good to have some generally available alternative.

2, 3, 4: These seem reasonable, though I'm not sure there's a major problem they're needed to address.

5: I'm still in favour of mandatory HMDs, but at least encouraging their use would be good. I definitely think it'd be good for players to plot together and address problems up front.

6: Yes, this would be very good. I think too many canons in UG@ suffered from waiting around for their turn in the mission rota to come up while supposedly vitally important stuff happening in them just... idled.

Canons can be app'ed even if they're unfinished/still airing, as long as there is enough of them to provide something solid to base missions and other plot elements on. So a mostly finished but still airing series is okay to app, but something that's only out for a few episodes is not.

Original characters must be fully finished, with a finalized mission list, of course.

Awkward canons will be handled on a case by case basis. Timeskips are always hard to incorporate into the game, unless there are dimensional shanenigans at work. But we had several in this game and in UG1 so we should be able to handle it.
Lack of resources and alienation are hard to simulate in a game that is a crossover of several canons, most of which don't have these problems. In examples you provided, it's most likely that Macross and Sidonia will have their own teleporters, which will create a degree of seperation while still letting canon characters interact with the rest of the game.

Missions have limited player slots and are often scheduled for times when not everyone can make it - which is why we always stressed out that no player character should be ICly "punished" by being absent from one. Players should always assume that just because someone's character wasn't present on a mission does not mean that they were doing nothing at the time. This will be further stressed out in UG3 if necessary.

There's something I'd like to ask about #6 there...

Would it be fine to run certain events in an arc as a 'mini-mission' of sorts, instead of a log on the IC comm? AIM or IRC doesn't really matter, but I do find that some events play better as real-time ones rather than a log, because people can focus on them easier.

Yeah, there's the matter of needing a mission runner or someone qualified to run missions present for these; but I think this has potential given how many log-based events in UG@ have been left unresolved due to interest dying down over time. I know some of us would much rather get these over with in a few hours than having to check back on a post every time, especially after a hard day of work.

Action based events in particular are much more exciting if run mission-style, too.

Okay one question, are there any canons within SRW the franchise, that would not be appable into UG3, by the rules you applied here?
There are some size S/human sized ones that come to mind that I don't know how their mooks or bosses would work out in the game, but it's better to hear it from the mods decision.

I'll be blunt - your suggestion is very unlikely to be implemented.

The game always has a lot of missions that need to be run and I don't see that changing for UG3. Only adding into that list with events that can be run as logs is not a good idea.

There is also the usual problems that come with missions - scheduling incompatibilities, people who wanted to be on the mission but couldn't make it feeling excluded, etc.

I can't think of any such canons.

But I did not play every single SRW game and I am not intimately familiar with all the shows even from SRWs that I did play, so consider this a general response and not official mod team "word of god".

Do you have any specific canons you want to ask about in terms of UG3-appability?

Edited 2013-12-13 23:54 (UTC)

Heroman, SD Gundam Sangokuden, and Keroro Gunsou come to mind.

Totally appable.

I'll clarify that this doesn't automatically mean 'add more missions for the mods to run even though they can be run as logs'.

It's more along the lines of: 'if a few people have an idea for an event that can be run as a mini-mission, and they can schedule it themselves; is it okay for them to run it as a mission of their own and log it for everyone else to read later?'

The mission runner can really be anyone qualified. That doesn't just mean the mods, but it can also be someone who's voted to do so.

Ideally, these events would have 5 players or less. Of course, you can't get rid of people feeling excluded - just like missions - but it's definitely a way to fix the big problem that I see with everything that's been run as a log, especially the entire thing with posting order, which can get confusing at times.

This also helps now that running your own events will be encouraged. So just like a player-made event post, all someone has to do is obtain mod permission beforehand.

Edited 2013-12-14 08:00 (UTC)

I see. If it would be run by a player and thus not give the mods more work? That may actually work. It still has some drawbacks (mainly that mission type events sometimes can feel exclusionary when people who want to participate can't make it, and running as a mission means people who want to post later can't do so as well), but it is an interesting idea so it will be discussed between the mods as a possible addition to the game.

Edited 2013-12-14 22:52 (UTC)

I feel like this would be a bad idea on a few levels. For one, it seems inescapably cliquish. For another, it means if you want to know what actually happened on one of these mini-missions you'd have to read a chat transcript, which just isn't as legible as a DW thread.

But mostly, if you can coordinate up to a half dozen players who can all get on AIM or whatever at the same time for an hour or two, couldn't they just use that window to OOC coordinate posting in a normal thread? That covers most of the benefits of running events in real time, while keeping the post feeling "open" and visible in real time to other players, and more seamless with the rest of the game. It also means other players can contribute outside of the main thread if that could make sense, while rules or just guidelines about threadjacking could keep a planned posting order from getting screwed up.

Three wierd penguin things were bugging me about the chances of something called...what was it...oh yeah, "Prinny Kaiser X" making it into UG3. On that note, how would you treat original, mecha based stories/canons based on pre-existing, non mecha stories/canons?

Edited 2013-12-17 08:22 (UTC)

Being inspired by various non-mecha canons is alright. To provide an UG@ example, Metal Knight Paragon was inspired by the Ultima series. But just taking a non-mecha story and turning it into a mecha one by adding giant robots will no longer be accepted. Arduus Umbris is an example of such a canon in UG@, being Shadow of the Colossus WITH (even more) GIANT ROBOTS - and I really liked it personally, but that's beyond the point.

Think that's a no, doods...

From the stuff I do know about Sd Gundam bbw, is the faction leaders get mobile armors. By on the flip side, that's the largest of things. The enemies are all still 2.5 feet tall (going from comparisons from sd Gundam force).

Just keep that in mind. All enemies are super tiny.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this, but I didn't even realize that a serious rumor was spawned by this suggestion.

I know that Aero and myself have been getting at this for some time, and it's come to my attention that a number of people strongly and collectively believe the idea was born from a desire to be cliquey. To say that I'm appalled by this discovery is an understatement, because I've been here for two years now, and the most I've done was ask a few people not to tag me. The fact that I was jumped on for bringing this up means that there's a clear mistrust present.

The problems I've mentioned are real ones, though. Some people think their action logs aren't interesting to others and don't garner enough of a response. Besides that, I know people do feel awkward backtagging in said logs, especially when some people tag faster than others, and the slower party has already missed a lot. Logs with important content that directly precede a mission are important to see to completion, too. Before the mission happens, usually.

As I've said, you can't get rid of people feeling excluded. Having a post with a single definite end feel 'open' isn't any better than completely locking it to others. Having an OOC window with gathered people coordinating to tag quickly would also be considered cliquey. Someone will always be left out. I personally think the 'open'-ness of the post is just an illusion. On the other hand, Chat transcripts being less legible than a DW thread is subjective, because I for one find it more and more difficult to read as the thread starts squashing all the text. Having more than 7 prompts for an event makes things seem very cluttered too.

I'll admit, it's not a perfect solution, and in the end, it was just a suggestion. What I will point out here though is that no ulterior motive was behind it, and it was made in the best interests of the game. In my case, I simply saw it as a way of getting more mission-like content and interaction across in a shorter time frame.

Admittedly, the part about being slow comes from personal experience. I'm one of the slower taggers around, with poor multitasking ability and have a short attention span on top of that. Staying glued to logs for more than a day isn't something I can do with little effort (my forgetfulness doesn't make this easier). I do try my best still, but just having an alternative to logs or full-on missions would have been great.

Edited 2014-01-08 17:12 (UTC)

I don't want to get in to the merits of the idea itself right now because I suspect that discussion would be better had in clearer air. I do want to address the rather strange impression I may have (I'm not sure how much of your reply is a response to me vs stuff I haven't seen) created.

I don't know what anyone else may strongly or collectively believe around this, because any such people haven't expressed those beliefs to me. Until now, your comments on this post were the only thing I'd heard about this idea, and if there was any other discussion of the idea that might have generated rumours in response I wasn't privy to any of that.

My reply meant only what it said - I wanted to voice agreement with the reservations expressed by the mod in the first reply, and add the observation that there seemed to be a more fitting way to accomplish what you described as your goal. If those two replies are what you're describing as being jumped on, I can assure you, for what it's worth, that such wasn't what I intended at all.

And on the main point, I didn't think, and don't think, and wasn't arguing from an assumption, that you had any sinister clique-based motive here. I think your idea would encourage cliqueiness, would lend itself to the creation of cliques, and would make the game look more cliquey to people both inside and outside it; that's not something unique to it, was one of multiple problems I saw with it, and has nothing to do with your intention in making it - only its effect in practice. (Honestly, the transcript thing would probably bother me more.)

I expect UG3 to have a tricky balancing act to pull between real-time/chat and asynchronous/journal modes and the advantages and disadvantages of each, and your suggestion may well fit in to that. Its advantages are clear, but its disadvantages also need to be considered. That's genuinely all I was trying to do here, and it's not at all based on suspecting anyone's motives.

The accusation of clique-ing wasn't done by Kami. It was done by me.

And for this, I apologize. It was extremely unfair of me to accuse you of that, especially since as you said - you tag almost everyone. It's a game where not everyone will get along so it's fine to not play with some other players, but for you that list is very small.

All I have to say is that when it happened, I was already annoyed so during the talk I lost my cool and said something hurtful without thinking. When you are angry, you say things without the brain bothering to check if they are actually true or not. This is not an excuse, only an explanation on why I acted the way I did.

So please don't blame Tengu or Steam, or the game itself. Blame me - not as a mod, but as a person who does really stupid things sometimes, things he regrets.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Planned changes for UG3

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