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Miscellaneous For anything related to Wyvern that does not fit into the other forums (this is not a place to goof off and post whatever nonsense comes to mind).

 
 
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Old 06-04-2016, 06:44 PM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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Default Why Arilou is so Criticial (Response to Salkand)

I’ve been joking with Salkand in the chatbox lately and I wanted to transition to being serious but there was no way I could say what I wanted to within the framework of the chat limit so I made a post instead. Quoted are the relevant shouts and below that is my follow up.

Quote:
05-29-2016 11:33 PM Arilou: There are legitimate flash fiction submissions (even though flash fiction is not accepted) but the bad work that I was referring to are the ones that come from the Salkands of the world who fancy themselves writers. So a 2 page “donky” story fits in with their self-delusion.

....

06-01-2016 03:36 PM Salkand: meh
06-01-2016 07:35 PM Arilou: Salkand! How goes the writing?
06-02-2016 04:20 PM Salkand: I don't write. At least I don't write stories. Despite what you believe; I never "fancied myself a writer." Yes, I attempted some wyvern-based stories when I was, what? 14-15? But since then I haven't dedicated any time to such endeavors.
06-02-2016 05:03 PM Arilou: That's terrible, Salkand. You were so prolific. I expected you to be on your third novel by now. What happened to make you squander such transcendent talent?
06-02-2016 06:31 PM Salkand: Hmm, it could be the sarcastic and demeaning behavior of a game admin on a young child's mind. As opposed to, you know a caring individual who teaches and inspires someone to do better?
06-02-2016 07:11 PM Arilou: What in the world are you talking about? I was your biggest cheerleader. Wait, I see now. You lost yourself to the drugs, didn't you? What did you in? Was it the Mary Jane? The crank? The white powder? It's not too late to get help, Salkand.

...

Yesterday 02:25 PM Salkand: Teshuvah was always pretty encouraging and supportive of the player base. Enough so that it makes one wonder. What if a wizard other than Tesh was causing the Lag, and then just convinced everyone to blame Tesh instead of them. Can anyone think of a wizard who would do such a thing?
On a serious note, you were a nuisance. Everyday I'd come to the forum not knowing if I was going to have to read yet another one of your terrible ideas. I wasn’t a friend, parent, or teacher. My job wasn’t to hold people’s hands. I had actual work to do and people who kept submitting bad ideas or bad maps took me away from that. Attempting to discourage people from continuing to waste wizard time is therefore something that I believed was best for the game.

Mind you, I tried the hand holding approach for about a year. The first wizard I promoted, I promoted because the person strongly indicated that he/she would give up if it wasn’t good enough that time. I felt bad and thought that maybe that person could improve with the ability to test maps online.


It was a disaster. The first thing that person did was go out in public and start disguising him/herself as various game images to attract a crowd. This went on for hours and I didn't want to criticize the person so I tried to nudge him/her away from that activity. The response I got was something alone the lines of; "You don't expect me to work on maps now, do you? I just became a wizard. I should be having fun." I said no, I didn't expect that when I really thought that, yes, I do expect you to be someone who wants to work on your maps and get them online, not someone who just wants to be a wizard to play around.

Unfortunately, I ended up directing the person away from doing this in New Verden instead of shutting it down entirely. I thought that he/she would get tired of it and get to work. Instead it went on for months until the person was banished. Meanwhile the work that was actually done was terrible in ways that I don't want to describe so as to avoid providing any identifying details. The point though is that it became clear that improvement was impossible and so a lot of stress and wasted time came out of my trying to be nice.

As for my other efforts; it was more of the same. I could get into how I remained visible most of the time so people could send me tells or the degree to which I would talk to people who broke the rules. However, I'll instead expand on the above. When people sent me their maps I always gave them full, detailed feedback and even went so far as to handhold people on how to do basic things like set teleporter paths. One person was obviously so incapable and could not follow my instructions. Yet, after much frustration, I took a couple of maps he/she sent me, set the teleporters correctly myself, and sent them back as a demonstration. That person then set his/her submission to another wizard and basically got promoted on the grounds that "at least he/she could figure out how to set teleporters properly."

Again, it was a massive disaster and all the while it took me (and others) away from work that could have been done instead. As a result of these things and everything else that I experienced that first year, I came to believe that it was best to take a hard-line approach and shut people down from the get-go. You, Salkand, came to Wyvern right around when I had come to that realization.

Also, although everyone is different, I come from the perspective of someone who has benefited from being told when my work was bad and so I don’t think it’s a good idea to delude people. When I was in elementary school it upset me that I couldn’t draw. I can picture every single line in an image coming together in my head but it doesn’t come out as anything resembling something good when I try to transplant those lines to paper. It was so distressing to me that I began to copy things onto tracing paper, tape it to regular paper, and then tell people that I drew it myself. I was looking for outside validation to make me feel better about something that I was better off accepting as outside of my skillset.


That's a rather involved saga in and of itself. The short of it is that I didn't get what I was looking for and I had to accept I couldn't draw, which allowed me to focus my efforts elsewhere.

In other areas, I feel that most of what I do is bad and I have since around Middle School. I get though that that's not always the case and when it's not it pushes me to be better, to improve.

So, in addition to my above reason, I'm also hard on people because I'm trying to instill something in them that I see as important, based on my experiences. If they give up then it's likely something they're bad at and no amount of work will change that and if they don't then, if they push themselves hard enough, perhaps they can turn things around and start producing something that isn't bad.

In my experience the type of people who think they're good and actually are, are geniuses. They're the type who wrote classic works of literature that go down in history or they're among the world's best painters or... you get the idea. However, below that level, if you're claiming your artistic work is great, then it usually isn't. In fact, it's usually terrible. It's the people who can see the flaws in their work that are able to improve upon them. Most of us aren't protegees. We have to actually put the work in to become good and if you already see yourself as good and don't want to listen to people trying to tell you otherwise, you will never improve.

That ties into my response to Salkand's stories. You, Salkand, weren't pushing them on us like you were with your ideas so, no, I was not trying to stop you from wasting my time. You asked, in shouts, for feedback and I told you it was absurd because it was. Then, because I felt you could handle it, I made it into a recurring joke because that's another thing I do for reasons I have gone into quite a bit in the past.

I will therefore skip over discussing the joking bit (although I will go into details if asked) and return to how I dole out feedback. I'm not a participation trophy minded person. I don't think people should be able to take a base if they strike out. It's through failure that we improve. Some of you get so upset when you lose a game or a match or whatever. I was that way as well... in elementary school. It's then that I learned to always pursue a game to its conclusion because there is often still the possibility to turn things around and because my aim is not to win but to gain a valuable experience and that's something that losing offers me as then I can become better at avoiding mistakes.

Similarly, if your story or drawing or whatever is bad and it's bad because you're 13 and of course it's going to be bad, I feel it's better to tell people that than let them think they should keep doing what they're doing. However, if what you show me isn't bad, I will tell you that it's good and go out of my way to be as supportive as I can be. I've worked with some very talented people over the years and although I don't doubt they would have gone on to do amazing things on their own, I'm immensely happy if my encouragement/support helped them in every the smallest way.

I only have one serious regret in terms of who I was critical of. There was a wizard who was working on his/her second area and I was going through some personal loss at the same time as I was dealing with the stress of being made Arch Wizard and I handled the review of his/her area poorly. This was someone who I like a lot and Teshuvah and I saw him/her perfect Senior Wizard material. Basically, we were just waiting for that second area to promote that person. I don't want to get into it, but it is something I think back on often and wish I handled it differently.

With everything else... not so much. If you wanted validation, you should have drawn something and given it to your parents to put on the fridge. If you wanted to develop something, you should have learned to listen to and accept negative criticism without letting it cripple you.
  #2  
Old 06-05-2016, 02:12 AM
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-_-

Since we are being serious. I stopped writing because my focus was set on other things. Wyvern going down was probably the best thing possible for me. I started dedicating more time to the Martial Arts and actually seeing real improvement. Although I did have a serious knee injury, followed shortly by a hernia operation; I applied for various Law Enforcement positions throughout CA. I took up, cycling and Yoga, on top of an already extensive hobby list (fishing, running, hiking/backpacking, Karate, weight training etc). I've recently enrolled through the ISSA to become a personal trainer. Long boring story short. I stopped writing because it simply wasn't a priority for me. Although I considered it relaxing I was already aware that I didn't want to dedicate the time it would take to improve, or to actually make a decent story. You actually had nothing to do with my decision to stop writing.
To be completely honest, your banter with players (myself included) makes me laugh. Except for this last monologue of a post. It was sort of depressing.
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  #3  
Old 06-05-2016, 10:16 AM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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I can always rely on you to allow yourself to be a punchline so, despite addressing this to you, it’s less about you and more about misunderstandings that I’ve seen people have with my way of handling things in general.

As I was talking to you I got a nice email from a talented person who I tried to encourage back in the day and is now working professionally in a creative field. That, talking to you, and dealing with nonsense submissions again made me think of all the times I’ve had to explain that I’m not trying to be mean before and I’m in the mood to clarify things at the moment since I’m likely not going to be around much longer. As I’ve said before, my being here is dependent on there not being very many people around and so when activity permanently spikes again I’ll have to step back.

So if anyone wants to prompt me to either be serious or to Don Rickles some people, now is the time to do so.

Btw, did you forget to list reviewing artwork even though you know nothing about that or have you given that up as well? And please tell me you're joking about the law enforcement thing. Remember when I had to explain to you that dragons weren't real? And before you say that was a long time ago, you're also the end of the world guy.
 


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