James

[font=arial]Quick question - and I apologize if I've missed something obvious - what's the difference between the Repliforce and the Maverick Hunters? I am only familiar with the Maverick Hunters series of RPGs developed by Flash and Warlock. But those RPGs took major liberties and were only loosely based on the videogames. I'm interested in joining but I was a bit confused about those two groups.[/font]

[font=arial]I am currently working as the Accounts & Claiming Officer at my company. Right now I am working in the healthcare industry...it's really an industry I fell into, more or less. But I must say, I do enjoy my job. Although it's an accounts based job (and nobody likes accounts), I have a lot of involvement with setting processes and working with State Managers. So that can be very rewarding. It's a high-pressure job though...on a daily basis I work with the National Finance Manager and the CEO. Still, I rarely dislike my job. The down side is the hours. It's full-time but I am regularly working back well after 5pm. And given the type of role I have, that can be very stressful. It's why I rarely have much time for online stuff (which really sucks). I don't make it easy for myself though. I'm about to start part-time study on top of full-time work. I've applied to do a Bachelor of International Studies, so hopefully that all goes through.[/font]

[font=arial]The easiest way to find this out is to either go into the Community Events forum and check out the latest event...or to take a look in the Art Studio. These are really the only two places on the site where you will find any art contests (but for the record, there are no art-related events going on at the moment - at least as far as Community Events are concerned).[/font]

[QUOTE=Raina][SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman][COLOR=Blue]Um, I have a question. If something happened to theO (may God forbid), how much of it would affect OB and myO? I understand that the sites aren't as close to eachother as it once was, but the sites are still connected to eachother. For example, you need a myO account to be able to launch the JukeBox here on OB. [/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/QUOTE] [font=arial]Well, all three sites are fundamentally linked. We share the same server, we share staff and we also share content and other things. So I'd say we're pretty close. I view the sites as three sister sites. Each play their own unique and important role in the broader network. The network (and thus all three sites) is owned by Velegant Media LLC. As far as what would happen to OB if something happened to theOtaku...it just depends. If theOtaku had to shut down, then that would be a massive threat to us of course (since we are all funded by Velegant). Although if it ever came to that I'm sure we could sort something out. As far as AnimeFF...don't be concerned. There are many people out there who are sue-happy and who love to throw threats around. Ultimately if you are confident that you are doing the right thing, that isn't much of a problem.[/font]

[font=arial]I think the problem is that this would add another step to the process. I am already of the view that our sites are too difficult/annoying to navigate as-is...splash-pages are notoriously bad for slowing down navigation further. The fewer steps involved in reaching your goal, the better. But there are other things we can and will do to connect the sites further. It just tends to be somewhat gradual (frustratingly so for some, I acknowledge). Regarding the situation with AnimeFF, I think my thoughts on it (as well as the thoughts of any reasonable person) would have to be pretty obvious. I'm not sure what good it would do to have some kind of campaign on OB though (I think Adam is doing a good enough job publicising the issues in detail as-is), but it's not necessarily taboo to discuss. [/font]

[font=arial]First of all, regarding the dispute you mentioned...I am not so sure it is wise or appropriate for OtakuBoards to make any official statement about it. This is especially true if there are legal issues involved. That no threads were made doesn't have much relevance to the support we have for theOtaku, I don't think. I'm sure there are plenty of things that happen within each of the three network branches (theO, myO and OB) that the other branches have no involvement in - this does not necessarily mean that the sites aren't close or that they aren't working together. In terms of the overall relationship, I think you just have to look at the realities of running this network. Adam himself is incredibly busy with major new projects all the time - whether that's Art of Otaku or another network site/hub. This, combined with his day-to-day responsibilities, leaves little time for him to become directly involved with other aspects of the network on a frequent basis. And the reverse is true for me - I used to post items on theOtaku.com's front page and I used to be heavily involved with myOtaku development and things like that. Due to my own time constraints and responsibilities, I can now only really focus on OtakuBoards itself. Does this mean that the relationship has changed fundamentally? I don't think so. It just literally means we can't do everything we'd like to do. For years Adam and I have talked about closer OB/theO integration. But a lot of people do not realize what this entails - we have enough trouble gathering the resources necessary to update and run our own corners of the network...building major connections would require the kind of resources that we just can't produce at the moment. I think each site in the network has its own place, honestly. There are people who live at myO but who have never registered here and who rarely have anything to do with news or articles at theO. And there are plenty of people who live at OB and have no interest in the rest of the network. And there's nothing wrong with that - all we can do is try to encourage more connections all the time. So those are my thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately most of it just boils down to time/responsibility issues. I know this is true for both Adam and myself, anyway. If both of us could do what we really wanted, I think you'd see a very different network. We have often talked about the "what ifs" and we do have a lot of big ideas. It's just tough to turn those into reality at times. [/font]

[quote name='Steel-Winged Angel']O.k. I can now cross out that my computer is acting up. Shouldn't the Technical staff or something be on this problem?[/quote] [font=arial]Unfortunately we don't have the resources at the moment. We have only one "technical staff" member - Justin. But Justin has been too busy with other things to really focus on the smaller help requests at OB right now. The only option I really have (if either myself or one of the other staff members doesn't have an answer for you) is to speak with Adam about the issue. Adam is not terribly familiar with Virtual Bulletin to my knowledge though, but you never know...between us we might be able to sort it out.[/font]

[font=arial]The last game I bought was Call of Duty 3 for Xbox 360. I actually got Call of Duty 2 with my Xbox when I first bought it and I was pretty surprised at how great it was - it was my favourite Xbox 360 launch game and one of my overall favourites on the system. Call of Duty 3 is as good as its predecessor - it improves in a few key areas though. For one thing, planting explosives now results in a kind of mini-game (similar to what you would have seen in Shenmue or something). Also, there are new dynamic mini-games that are very reminiscent of both Shenmue and Resident Evil 4 - if a solider is hiding from you and they suddenly grab your gun, you actually get into a scuffle with them that involves rapid presses on RT/LT. Some of these mini-games are more elaborate, but generally speaking, they do break things up really nicely and they keep the game exciting (as if it really needed that, haha). I'm not a huge FPS fan and I'm also not a big fan of WWII games - in fact, I usually go out of my way to avoid them. But I'm loving the Call of Duty series a lot...and so far Call of Duty 3 has been wonderful all the way through. The only negative for me is that you can't skip the cut scenes. This is very annoying, as some of them are fairly lengthy. Plus, I frankly just don't care about the story at all; it doesn't really interest me. It's a small gripe though; other than that, I'm very happy with the overall experience.[/font]

[font=arial]I've contracted someone to develop Otakupedia for me (on the technological side anyway) so hopefully that'll be ready before too long. The address will probably be [url]www.otakuboards.com/otakupedia[/url] or something like that. And of course, we will have a front page link to the site. I do kind of like the idea of a forum category for Otakupedia though, but I just think it would become too difficult to manage with threads.[/font]

[font=arial]I really want to see Pan's Labyrinth - I almost went yesterday but it didn't end up happening. The movie is playing in Cinema Europa down here where I am (Cinema Europa is basically for foreign films). Is this movie subtitled? Given its apparent scale, I was kind of surprised that it would be shown as an independent film. [/font]

[QUOTE=The Boss][color=darkred][size=1] Question. If you are going to go by Desbreko's lay out, will the Anthology and other single author stories be in the Adventure Square? Will the Underground be deleted all together?[/color][/size][/QUOTE] [font=arial]At this stage I'm not planning to go by Desbreko's layout. The point that I'm following with Desbreko is related to a better grouping situation - he's right in that sense. In terms of his specific forum structure, I don't think it's quite what I want to follow at this point. At the moment I'm really not comfortable with merging OB Anthology and Adventure Square. However, I do think that Arena Underground can probably be rolled into Adventure Inn.[/font]

[font=arial]I will take your suggestions into account - but I should mention that when this update occurs, the site might be down for a little longer than it was for the last update (perhaps for most of the weekend). Changing forums around is one thing, but we need to radically change our sticky threads - they are too many of them and they are too lengthy at the moment.[/font]

[font=arial]Yep, it's on the way.[/font]

[font=arial]Yep, The Arena/Creative Writing is next on the list. Hardwired was a relatively simple issue, but making the changes we need in The Arena will be a bit more difficult. Those won't happen just yet, probably in a week's time or so. There's still a few things to be done with Hardwired first.[/font]

[font=arial]I agree - I think that the problematic threads will be pretty obvious. We are probably better off just getting rid of the ratings system completely. If people really feel that they want to warn people about an RPG's content, they can do that if they choose to. I would still like to find a way to rate RPGs, but it's just not going to be possible without a more integrated system - it can't be done the way we've done it thusfar. So we'll have to think about that.[/font]

[QUOTE=Desbreko][color=#4B0082]Well, "maturity" and "mature content" are two different things. I hate using the same word in both cases but there seems to be no good substitute. Obviously low quality RPGs will get the same treatment regardless of whether the filter is in effect or not. But, when generous amounts of swearing are called for by the type of characters present in a quality RPG, are we going to have any sort of system set up to let people know about that before they jump into the thread, like the ratings were supposed to do? The question pretty much boils down to whether we're going to replace the ratings with some other system or simply drop them, in the event that the swear filter remains disabled.[/color][/QUOTE] [font=arial]Well, I suppose my question is...what options do we really have? We either have user-centric ratings (that rely on user accuracy) [i]or[/i] we have Moderators make determinations on each thread. The former probably won't work and the latter isn't realistic. My preference is to keep the language filter disabled for the time being, because I do not want RPGs to be limited - I don't want the many to be unfairly punished because of the few who can't use language appropriately. RPGs with ridiculous or inappropriate language use should really be treated the same as those with other types of low quality content. In terms of the overall debate...let me just say that forum overhauls are very much on my mind and they have been for a while. Much of what is being suggested here is spot-on, in terms of what we actually need. I think you can expect some of these changes to occur well before any new version of the site appears.[/font]

[font=arial]At this point, I don't really want to merge Play It with Movies, Music & TV (although I can understand the logic involved there - it certainly may happen in the future). In terms of maturity in RPGs...we have always supported mature RPGs. It's not about maturity at all, it's about quality. If you swear like a nut in an RPG, that RPG will [i]probably[/i] be low quality. I mean, it would be no different to having shockingly bad dialogue or no paragraphs. So a lack of quality is a lack of quality, you know? That shouldn't have an impact on the maturity of an RPG. I think we are making the mistake of confusing swearing with maturity.[/font]

[font=arial]I have actually been thinking of merging Hardwired with Play It for a while...combining both forums and cleaning up the new, larger forum a bit might be a good idea. I just wonder if we can justify the forum having it s category in that case, though. I might need to look at making a change there as well.[/font]

[QUOTE=Ezekiel][SIZE=1]Maybe it's just me, but I'd get annoyed with that very quickly. I can't see the problem with having one forum for stories and another for interractive games. That way everyone knows where things belong and how to use their threads in that specific forum. [/SIZE][/QUOTE] [font=arial]Well, I can't see the problem with having them seperate either. But that seperation seems to be part of the issue here. I personally think that Anthology is more than capable of standing on its own two feet, but I do acknowledge that in the past we had stories and games combined...and that was never a big problem. It wasn't as confusing as it may seem. However, there's obviously a reason why we seperated them in the first place. So it's probably worth remembering why we did that originally.[/font]

[font=arial]Hm...archiving, eh? I don't know. On one hand I can understand where you're coming from and it does make sense. On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about archiving that much content all at once. I suppose there is no real harm in doing it, but unearthing older RPGs might become cumbersome (although I suppose this would not happen terribly often).[/font] [quote]6. Let's take down the whole Arena and replace it with Games & Stories Now this is an actual, constructive suggestion. It would be a big change that probably couldn't be implemented over night, but it's definitely worth thinking about. It would certainly bring similar things to the same place, and unite people like the separated sections never could. I do have one problem with it, though. We need to think about the clogging up. Adventure Square is already one of the most active sections in this whole board, so what would happen if we added all the fanfics and games to it? It would really become a huge, huge section with this amount of members. Even with the different tags in each thread, would people really find what they're looking for there? It must've worked really well back in the day OB was still comparably small place, but nowadays... I just can't say. [/quote] [font=arial]I don't entirely understand the logic behind the Games & Stories idea. I mean...all you're really doing is changing a name and collapsing the forums into one larger forum. I'm not sure that's entirely realistic. As you mentioned, there could be a serious problem with there being [i]too much[/i] content in the one spot. I remember people used to complain about Games & Stories because there was so much activity that if you didn't post in your RPG for a day or two, it would slip to the second or third page - thus causing a lot of people to forget about it. Sometimes higher activity levels aren't a good thing. It might make sense, however, to merge Adventure Square and OB Anthology. This way we could have one creative writing forum that encompasses a wide variety of projects, including stuff created by individuals and stuff created by groups of people. That might work. The only other reason I'm hesitant about returning to a Games & Stories setup is that for a long time, we did not have a sign-up sub-forum. This led to random people jumping into established RPGs and pushing them off-track (much to the frustration of the RPG creator). You could put sign-up threads in the same actual forum, but this would be too cumbersome and confusing. Perhaps we could simply merge Adventure Square and OB Anthology, but still maintain a sign-up sub-forum for those who want to use it. Arena Underground could, perhaps, be a sub-forum underneath Adventure Inn, rather than a seperate front-page forum. This would make the front page a little neater, but it would also keep everything bundled together nicely (while still ensuring that we don't get everything all tangled up).[/font]

[font=arial]As I said earlier, I have not read all the posts in this thread - I'm coming into the discussion somewhat late. But my previous point still stands; a lot of suggestions are made and they are often made without much thought as to how difficult they could be to implement. Let's not forget that some things would have to be included retroactively - we'd have to go back and make edits to previous threads (perhaps those threads that are up to three or four months old, rather than [i]all[/i] of them). So we have to be careful about that. Right now I'm still undecided on a lot of what I'm reading. I can make a couple of points though. First, again, let's keep it simple. No more ratings - it might definitely be time to get rid of them entirely. As they currently exist, we rely too much on members including them and we also rely too much on Moderators editing them. If people are not using ratings correctly, their original purpose becomes non-existant - the whole point of ratings was so that we could have a range of threads with a range of content and members could glance at a thread to decide what level of content is involved. If people aren't using ratings properly, this entire system becomes pointless. Adding different types of ratings, as has been said, is only putting a new face on the same problem. People either won't read about them, or they will still rely on the maximum rating to give them plenty of scope (or to artificially boost the popularity of their RPG). In terms of implementing a language filter in Adventure Square...I'm not so sure I agree with that. First of all, I think most people will agree that swearing in the context of a story is different from swearing in the context of a regular discussion. Secondly...people will either find ways to bypass the language filter to allow for swearing in their dialogue (which looks ugly and is more cumbersome), or their dialogue will be artificially restricted for no good reason. Blocking swearing will only block a symptom, not a cause. If someone is going to rely on too much swearing in their story, the story itself (dialogue or whatever else) is probably low quality. Swearing or no swearing...low quality is low quality. The dialogue will probably be awful anyway. Blocking swearing makes little difference there - all it does is frustrates those who want to use it wisely.[/font]

[font=arial]I haven't read every post in this thread, but I do have a few things to point out. First of all, I agree that the ratings aren't entirely adequate. We really can not base ratings on film ratings either - film ratings are different from country to country. What we really need is a system that is unique to OtakuBoards. In terms of the overall point to this discussion...I think we need to consider what the real problem is. Are we saying that there's just too much swearing in Adventure Square? Or are we saying that people aren't using ratings properly? I'm not sure if I agree that every RPG is full of profanity. Generally I think people are using language appropriately. But I do agree that everyone seems to create M-rated RPGs to simply cover themselves - they probably do this for a variety of other reasons, but either way, it comes down to a rating being used improperly. The main issue I take with any of these suggestions is that most of them would involve a [i]lot[/i] of work. And my question is, who is going to do that work? For example, the suggestion about staff rating threads rather than members doing it. Who is really going to sit down, read samples from every single thread and then rate it? What about older threads? Do they get retroactively rated as well? And if so, who will do that? There are many great suggestions here. But many of them take away one layer of beauracracy and add ten more layers - who is really going to do all of that work? And is this the most effective way to fix things? What we need to be thinking about is how to reduce the amount of rules and regulations on OtakuBoards. We need to make RPG creation more fun and easy. Right now, I am of the opinion that our current system is a little too complex - we require people to read so many threads and things have been built one on top of the other to the point of ridiculousness. So we have to keep it simple. Part of this, I think, will involve physically shrinking our site further - drawing it back to a lesser number of forums. The second step would be a much higher level of Moderator involvement, in terms of going in and moving things, cleaning things up and editing things. And then we'll need to eliminate many of our current sticky threads and replace them with simpler, easier systems. If anyone can come up with ways to dramatically downsize and simplify the way we deal with these types of threads, I think they will find that I am going to be a lot more receptive. The ideas themselves are wonderful, but we need to really consider how these ideas can be implemented and who is actually going to invest the time to do that. [/font]

[quote name='AzureWolf][COLOR=maroon']Shouldn't you have one for the Geisha theme as well?[/COLOR][/quote] [font=arial]Considering that there weren't many entries for the Liquid theme (and given that the Liquid theme is used by the majority of members), I thought it'd be very difficult to get enough submissions for the Geisha theme. I'm sure we can do something for that theme in the future though. It's kind of been left out - it actually needs a lot of heavy updating, I'm not happy with it at all.[/font]

[font=arial]Thanks everyone. I've chosen one of White's banners, as I felt it most-suited the boards in terms of layout/colour/etc. But I have to say, there were quite a few great entries here (Delta's, for example, was a pretty unique and colourful take on a Christmas theme - I thought that was very cool). Thanks to everyone who joined in! I think we'll have to have another competition like this again soon. :catgirl:[/font]

[font=arial]I've been playing a little more and I'm now up to the [spoiler]Lakebed Temple[/spoiler]. How many dungeons are there in total, by the way? So far I'm loving the game, although I think I've gone to the third temple a little prematurely - I still only have one special move and I haven't learned any more. My sister was telling me that she had learned one or two more by that stage, so I'm behind her I think, lol. Anyway, I felt that the game's opening was relatively slow, but once you hit the first dungeon the game really hits its stride. So far I've been thoroughly impressed - I'm now used to using motion control for combat (which I love) and I am loving horseback combat and using the pointer for the arrows and boomerang. Great stuff! I do agree with others in the sense that TP is just too easy in termrs of combat...this is disappointing when you also consider that fighting in the game can be so much fun. I would personally rather simpler dungeon puzzles and much tougher enemy battles in Zelda games. TP's dungeon puzzles are okay - nothing too complex yet, but certainly there is plenty of variety to keep things interesting. The story seems to be moving along well - probably better than in past 3D Zeldas - and I am really preferring many of the characters in TP. Last night I [spoiler]escorted Telma to Kakariko Village[/spoiler] and I thought that was a great way to break up gameplay (and to make the journey back a lot more fun). This level of variety seems to be seperating TP from past 3D Zeldas (particularly OoT). Despite the fact that people have said TP seems very tired...I'm actually finding a lot of fresh experiences here. Yes, the general progress and many of the game's key elements are very familiar, but the overall experience is definitely quite new where it counts. It sounds like I've still got a long way to go though, so I'm looking forward to seeing what more surprises are in store. Oh and...I have to say, now that I'm used to the Wii version, I don't think I'd want to play this game on GameCube. The manual camera just isn't worth what you'd sacrifice in play control. If you have no choice then sure, the GameCube version is going to be great. But if you own a Wii...I think the choice is a no-brainer.[/font]