Kassil's page

Please verify the state laws regarding background checks for adults interacting with minors in both the home state of paizo and gencon. There are liability issues and child endangerment issues to consider. I strongly urge you speak with legal council and social services if you have not done so already. Best luck and be safe.

Before Paizo, I worked Crimes Against Children and Special Victims as a police detective for almost 10 years. I have more than 1500 hours of training in all aspects of child abuse, child abduction, and child homicide, as well as various other topics. I also was a member of the NW Georgia child abduction response team. Besides my normal case load, I worked more than 500 cases along side the Department of Family and Childrens' Services in Cobb County Georgia during that time span. I am well aware of the liabilty and child endangerment issues that need to be considered. This is one reason the tables we be located directly alongside PFS HQ. Additionally, it is why we require a parent or guardian to remain with their child at all times during the two hour sessions. Finally, it is why I am personally screening any GM that will be involved with running the tables for 4 children and their parents.

I appreciate your concerns, take the matter of child welfare extremely seriously, and welcome any further emails you may have.

What is Paizo's mission statement?

I always thought that it was:

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women."

-Lisa

robot chris: the pig is like the atm of the meat world

crystal: If you don't like vegemite, it's a sign of your pact with satan

robot chris: ross: you realize populations take your theories and smoosh them into a crazy paste?

clark peterson: There, I just got the pom poms out and did a little dance. Go team!

gary: This bug should now be fully smashed flat into little buggly bits.

gary: do not break mai minions!!

gary: need them intact for world domination plans

robot chris: I want to start a career in stamp licking

robot chris: the really gross stamps

crystal: My designer's soul is a twisted, malformed beast with no sense of right or wrong

gary: [redacted]

liz: ...And that's a comment I wish I could put up on the Overheard thread.

Sara Marie wrote:

crystal: If you don't like vegemite, it's a sign of your pact with satan

Oh oracle, are there other signs?

Dislike of vinegar.

sara marie: well, here is an interesting order for the tech team... order # [redacted]

ross: looking it up

...

ross: What is up with it?

sara marie: Look at the [redacted].

...

ross: What? How?

...

ross: Gary, you should peek too.

...

gary: how did he...

cosmo: you phrased that answer really well.

sara marie: Thanks! I actually just copied and pasted it from what gary told me the answer was.

cosmo: well then, Gary phrased it really well!

gary: I've been told to brainstorm some stuff for a surprise meeting at 3 and it works great when everybody here brainstorms and then i take credit for everybody's ideas.

I see. I saw it, and I couldn't figure out why a rogue act as cavalry or use that sort of equipment.

Because sometimes that's what heroes do, weapon proficiency penalties be damned.

Lol. You get a 120k active playerbase (again using the 20% rule means about 24k online most nights) in a fantasy game that is on one "server" that is majority non-instanced content without horrendous lag in populated areas or daylong queues and I'll eat my hat on youtube.

I'll take that bet.

BTW, just curious, are you aware of what the (single shard) Champions Online game achieved in its PCU?

Or the (single shard) Star Trek Online?

How about Darkfall?

Ultima Online?

Second Life?

Do you understand the difference between "PCU", and "number of active players in the same virtual space"?

Do you understand the difference between server-lag, client-lag, and network-lag? And how those relate to the number of active players that can inhabit the same virtual space?

EVE can support about 1,000 active players in the same virtual space without major performance problems on the server or network (client lag is the biggest problem at this scale, primarily due to video card issues). It can get up to about 2,000 active players in the same virtual space without crashing the server, but performance degrades badly on the server.

EVE has 7,500 star systems. Each system can be hosted on its own node (called a Sol server), although in practice most systems are hosted on shared Sol Servers because they do not generate enough traffic volume to require dedicated hardware.

Within each system, virtual spaces called "grids" by the players are created for each active player, and are shared by active players within a certain range (which is dynamically resized). It is possible to have those 1,000 active players scattered all over the system, or concentrated in one grid - the load on the server is effectively the same, although the network load goes up as a function of N^2, where N = number of active objects being tracked by the server. So 1,000 active players in 1,000 grids would be less taxing on the system than 1,000 active players on one grid.

When a player is in a station, that player is not considered an "active player" in the system's virtual space - so the total population of a system could be much, much higher than 1,000 without causing performance problems.

EVE's system would be infinitely scalable to the point (at least) where each grid could be run on its own hardware except for one problem. The game's core logic is written in Stackless Python, which is one of the reasons EVE was able to grow to the size it was, but now has become a limiting factor. Stackless Python cannot be run across multiple cores. It has a programmatic object (called the GIL) that doesn't enable it to spawn multi-core processes. Long before I left CCP there was work underway to address this issue, but until the problem is solved, there likely are hardware limits to the growth that EVE can maintain within a single virtual space. (The interested can watch this talk: http://blip.tv/carlfk/mindblowing-python-gil-2243379) (And you can see some of how CCP is dealing with this here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=925)

The idea that a modern "massively" multiplayer online game should have a PCU in the 3,500-5,000 range (I'm looking at you, WoW & WoW clones) is ridiculous. WoW was designed in the early part of the 2000s. It's been nearly 10 years since its network topology and database systems were devised, 10 years which have seen the rise of all sorts of better solutions for transaction processors (look into CouchDB, for one example). But since Theme Park MMOs don't gain much value from having large simultaneous server populations or large virtual space population, most of the theme park segment hasn't bothered to try and come up with a better solution. In fact, they're actively developed to avoid large concentrations of players. Can you imagine what some of the shared spaces in WoW would be like if 1,000 characters were all in the same virtual space? They feel excessively crowded with just a few dozen!

Anyway "tad10", you should probably start picking out that hat now, and we'll be sure to link the video on our community site after your meal.

RyanD

James Jacobs wrote:

rouge-like

Typos like this make me blush as they tend to lipstick out. It's not like eye shadow your posts looking for them, but the boards are no concealer from such base errors. Fortunately, you're only one edit away from makeup and your foundation is secure. I guess this post means I mascara 'bout you.

You won the internets!

rouge-like

Typos like this make me blush as they tend to lipstick out. It's not like eye shadow your posts looking for them, but the boards are no concealer from such base errors. Fortunately, you're only one edit away from makeup and your foundation is secure. I guess this post means I mascara 'bout you.

Given that they've actually released 4e supplements focused on individual settlements (Vor Rukoth, Hammerfast, etc.) I'm inclined to chalk this up to a mistake on the part of their copy team rather than an insidious plot by the WotC guys to trick you into thinking that this is the first book about a city ever (which is pretty much what the blog post's author concludes as well).

Let's not be the sort of people who decide to be upset over something like this.

I guess this is as good a time as any to point out that I have coined a new thingie:

Sebastian's Law: Anybody who wants to be a moderator is unfit to wield the banhammer.

I really hate how this keeps coming back to my item.

This really isn't about why or why I didn't get rejected.

The reason it keeps coming back to you—and it's you much more than your item—is that you came onto our boards, trashed our judges and employees, and called us a bunch of glorified copy-and-pasters, with posts dripping in sarcasm and attitude, painting yourself as the victim all the while.

I'd especially point out these parts:

...looking over the stuff [Clark's] company has published and the comments he's made before, and listening to his stuff here, I just don't see how his opinion is worth anything.

And in your very next post, you state:

Now nothing I said so far has been inflammatory...

Either you don't understand how you come across, or you don't understand the meaning of the word "inflammatory."

And then you write this:

I think you should realize that you are representing yourself and your company to your audience, the people that buy your stuff.

You know, you also need to realize that people are judging you by the things you say, and though you called Clark a "a giant, over-glorified troll," well, I'll just note that the trolling being done here is all by you.

I'll tell you this: if Paizo *had* ever given you an assignment, after seeing the way you conduct yourself on our forums, I'd ensure that we never gave you another one.

I don't look forward to the next contest knowing he is a judge.

I hope you follow through with the indications you've given that you won't be entering. You'd be wasting everyone's time, because you're disrespectful, and in comportment, you're as far from an RPG Superstar as you can be. I'm glad you think highly of Neil, because you could learn quite a lot from him—and I'm talking about in life, not just in game design.