Game Night 2/6/2021 Poll!!!!

[Jeevan | 8,909]

@Mega Tank @spacepup @ZeldaFreak @ChickenTendas @Deadeye @fox @Rooster @Vectrex28 @0xDEAFC0DE @DefaultGen @Gloves @imabadguy1 @SNESNESCUBE64 @drxandy @ZeldaFan042 @Rhapsody98 @andrew244 @Costmosis @darkchylde28 @KokiriChild @Reed Rothchild @RegularGuyGamer @MegaMan52 @Scrobins @neodolphino @FireHazard51 @SailorScoutMandy @Megamanfan @AverageOliver98 @nettenette @Famicuber @Sumez @Dimo @BattySalem  @B.A. @Murray @Br81zad

 

What do you all wanna play this time?  Let's find out!!!!

Please remember we are gonna join up on the gather sight that we have setup, and guess what......there will now be a new room we meet in, which means i need to fix it .  Anyway, let us see what we want to play so I know what all I need to do to the room as of now!!!!

Gather information:

https://gather.town/app/8zzp7Nbd8FF62e4T/videogamesage

Password: e$ohXxD7Ddei

 

[Jeevan | 8,909]

I am gonna let this go an extra day since I forgot to post this yesterday.  That way for anyone who doesn't visit frequently to the forums can have a chance to vote.  Those of you who vote after Tues. at 6am will be shunned   lol jk

[Jeevan | 8,909]

@SailorScoutMandy didn't you suggest tetris 99         Even you didn't wanna play it!? 

[SailorScoutMandy | 782]

I didn't want to vote for a game that would makes other not wanna play haha. Seemed lots of hatred towards Tetris hahh

[Jeevan | 8,909]

56 minutes ago, SailorScoutMandy said:

I didn't want to vote for a game that would makes other not wanna play haha. Seemed lots of hatred towards Tetris hahh

afaik only me and gloves, but could be more   

[Jeevan | 8,909]

58 minutes ago, SailorScoutMandy said:

I didn't want to vote for a game that would makes other not wanna play haha. Seemed lots of hatred towards Tetris hahh

Look, Im ok with playing games I hate if you all like them, hence why i don't vote in these, or make it biased.......if that was the case you all would just be watching me stream my favorite games and game night would be no more   Dragon warrior 2 and 4 yes please   Really any rpg from back in the day tho.

[SailorScoutMandy | 782]

2 hours ago, Jeevan said:

Look, Im ok with playing games I hate if you all like them, hence why i don't vote in these, or make it biased.......if that was the case you all would just be watching me stream my favorite games and game night would be no more   Dragon warrior 2 and 4 yes please   Really any rpg from back in the day tho.

Too bad can't just insta lvl a wow character for everyone to run raids with. That's always a good time haha

[Rooster | 124]

I wasn't a huge fan of using gather.  I felt like it was more convenient to just voice chat over discord.

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

14 minutes ago, Rooster said:

I wasn't a huge fan of using gather.  I felt like it was more convenient to just voice chat over discord.

Yeah, I didn't participate in the last game night but I'm still kind of unclear on why there was a sudden switch to gather when I feel like Discord worked just fine, but eh.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

9 minutes ago, ZeldaFreak said:

Yeah, I didn't participate in the last game night but I'm still kind of unclear on why there was a sudden switch to gather when I feel like Discord worked just fine, but eh.

I didn't get a real clear answer on this, but the idea that my wife imparted upon me was something along the lines of preventing random VGS'ers who aren't intending to participate in game night from stumbling into it if they're just wanting to hop on and voice chat with some folks.  I agree that Discord is easier, but if the explanation I got is correct, I can understand why things went that way.  Not sure why we couldn't just open up a game night specific voice channel as well on those nights if that's the case, as there's nothing stopping folks from reading the Gather info and joining there if they really just want to talk to a bunch of folks who are live. 

Also, as I said that night, I'm also not a fan due to the fact that the app doesn't scale properly.  As I don't have an appropriate monitor to use with it, I've got my desktop PC hooked up to the main/family TV, which happens to be a 4K TCL set at the moment.  In order to easily read text, see icons, etc., I followed Windows' recommendation and allowed it to enlarge that stuff by 300%.  Most apps still display natively correctly, but Gather doesn't scale the black video chat boxes at the top of the screen, so I couldn't see the top of the chat room at all unless I was looking at my wife's laptop or I changed Windows' setting back to 100% enlargement, at which point I couldn't read anything from across the room.  Not an issue that everyone is experiencing, but to me, still a somewhat glaring flaw in the app.  If someone isn't using the video portion, there should be the option to turn it off and hide those boxes if they're not going to scale them with the rest of the screen.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Jeevan | 8,909]

3 hours ago, darkchylde28 said:

I didn't get a real clear answer on this, but the idea that my wife imparted upon me was something along the lines of preventing random VGS'ers who aren't intending to participate in game night from stumbling into it if they're just wanting to hop on and voice chat with some folks.  I agree that Discord is easier, but if the explanation I got is correct, I can understand why things went that way.  Not sure why we couldn't just open up a game night specific voice channel as well on those nights if that's the case, as there's nothing stopping folks from reading the Gather info and joining there if they really just want to talk to a bunch of folks who are live. 

Also, as I said that night, I'm also not a fan due to the fact that the app doesn't scale properly.  As I don't have an appropriate monitor to use with it, I've got my desktop PC hooked up to the main/family TV, which happens to be a 4K TCL set at the moment.  In order to easily read text, see icons, etc., I followed Windows' recommendation and allowed it to enlarge that stuff by 300%.  Most apps still display natively correctly, but Gather doesn't scale the black video chat boxes at the top of the screen, so I couldn't see the top of the chat room at all unless I was looking at my wife's laptop or I changed Windows' setting back to 100% enlargement, at which point I couldn't read anything from across the room.  Not an issue that everyone is experiencing, but to me, still a somewhat glaring flaw in the app.  If someone isn't using the video portion, there should be the option to turn it off and hide those boxes if they're not going to scale them with the rest of the screen.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I will address some of these concerns when I get home today.  We don't have to stick to gather, but it can offer up some benefits.  whether these benefits outweigh the issues is still being decided.  that was really a beta test to see if it was even a feasible thing to use.  hopefully we can decide over the next game night or 2 whether or not that will be the standard format.

[Jeevan | 8,909]

So, the real reason we are trying out gather is for a few things:

1)  It is a "private" area for vgs in general.  We can host a whole "host", sorry, i had to, of things from game night, to brew talk, other events, etc.

2)  There is no need to sign up for an account, so anyone who doesn't wanna sign up for discord doesn't have too.

3)  You can separate out sections for private conversations, i.e., if we play games with teams, we can all go to a designated section and discuss things without having 15 different voice channels.

4)  There are things you can do, like link videos, possibly spotify!?<----untested, play games while we wait for a spot to open.  Maybe even make extra rooms with games and do things, like a maze, hide and seek etc.  Kinda dorky, but an option.

5)  Have a separate room, like we do now, for game night!  That way we can have the normal participants who are there already be in one section while brew talk can be in another.  

This is not the final say, ultimately we will do what the masses want, don't get me wrong, but I think having an option to separate into teams makes it nice so we don't have to have multiple channels for breaking off for team chats.

There could be "live" werewolf games eventually as well if we can figure out how to do it.  

Really the possibilities are limited, but we can figure out how to do things.  They don't have to be so limited.  

[Rooster | 124]

I can't recall because I only spent a little time in gather, but does it have a push to talk function available?

[Jeevan | 8,909]

30 minutes ago, Rooster said:

I can't recall because I only spent a little time in gather, but does it have a push to talk function available?

It does not.  That I am aware of.

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

10 hours ago, Jeevan said:

So, the real reason we are trying out gather is for a few things:

1)  It is a "private" area for vgs in general.  We can host a whole "host", sorry, i had to, of things from game night, to brew talk, other events, etc.

2)  There is no need to sign up for an account, so anyone who doesn't wanna sign up for discord doesn't have too.

3)  You can separate out sections for private conversations, i.e., if we play games with teams, we can all go to a designated section and discuss things without having 15 different voice channels.

4)  There are things you can do, like link videos, possibly spotify!?<----untested, play games while we wait for a spot to open.  Maybe even make extra rooms with games and do things, like a maze, hide and seek etc.  Kinda dorky, but an option.

5)  Have a separate room, like we do now, for game night!  That way we can have the normal participants who are there already be in one section while brew talk can be in another.  

This is not the final say, ultimately we will do what the masses want, don't get me wrong, but I think having an option to separate into teams makes it nice so we don't have to have multiple channels for breaking off for team chats.

There could be "live" werewolf games eventually as well if we can figure out how to do it.  

Really the possibilities are limited, but we can figure out how to do things.  They don't have to be so limited.  

Again, I wasn't actually there previous game night so take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but a lot of these I feel like you can already accomplish on DC/are already accomplished on DC with relate ease.

1) Isn't that kind of the point of the VGS Discord already, having a place to host things in addition to general discussion? I feel like having it be a place to host events would be completely redundant since the VGS DC already exists, and we don't generally have problems with people from general randomly hopping over to the VC during a game night and not knowing what's happening or anything.

2) Most of the people who want to participate in the Game Night already have a Discord account as far as I can tell, so I feel like this is an issue that only affects maybe a couple people, if even that. And even if someone who wanted to participate didn't want to create a DC account for whatever reason, with Gather you'd still have to go to some bizarro website, create a username of some kind (I presume) and enter the password to go in to the room, so I'm not sure anyone who didn't want to create/doesn't already have a Discord account would want to do all that anyway to be honest.

3) You can, as you pointed out, just do that on Discord with different voice channels that you could just delete after the game night is over. or keep, but just lock until a future game night, but I suppose I'll give you that it sounds slightly easier to do on gather. Still though, creating a couple different voice channels isn't very difficult on Discord

4) I'm not sure what precisely you mean by linking videos, but if I'm understanding correctly, you can already do that in Discord, and as far as Spotify (or music in general) goes, you can easily do that in Discord by adding in a bot that allows you to play music, of which there are several for Discord. Granted, you can make the argument that it isn't a built-in feature of Discord, which is fair, but it still isn't all that difficult to do. And if the idea of using gather is for hosting events anyway, I'm not entirely convinced that feature would be utilized all that often anyway. The games thing, I will give you that you cannot do that on Discord as far as I'm aware, but to be fair you could also just google snake and kill some time there while you wait

6) Voice channels already fulfill this purpose, so this is completely redundant I feel.

I'm not 100% opposed to gather, and I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything, but I just feel like the arguments for using gather instead of Discord seem kind of... flimsy to be honest, since I feel like the only useful thing gather does that Discord doesn't is the teams thing, which again, you can just do with different voice channels on Discord and it isn't that cumbersome or difficult. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

Again though, this is coming from someone who hasn't actually used it and is just going off of descriptions of what it can do, so take all that with a grain of salt, like I said, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about anything I've said.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

3 hours ago, ZeldaFreak said:

Again, I wasn't actually there previous game night so take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but a lot of these I feel like you can already accomplish on DC/are already accomplished on DC with relate ease.

Reading between the lines of what @Jeevan said, my takeaway is that in simplest terms, the VGS Team would prefer to move all "official" chat to a platform that they can host on their own system(s) (utilizing the third party software only versus third party services as well) as well have complete control over.  Understandable, as this makes dealing with any sort of complicated issues that might arise (technical or not) simpler.

I may be off base with this additional take, but reading between the lines a bit more, I believe the team may want to do so specifically to preserve and protect ownership rights of anything/everything discussed in the "official" VGS chat, so that a third party company whose chat platform was being used doesn't technically own the rights to mine, sell, etc., all of the data being shared back and forth between users in the VGS "owned" Discord.  You know, the way that all the data shared back and forth on NA was summarily owned by Dain and packaged up and sold to unscrupulous parties with less than zero notice to anyone else.

Again, I might be reaching, but based on some of the language used in the explanation as well as it seeming to take time to formulate an answer for us (beyond, "we'd like to move to a platform where we can more easily do more things, such as [examples]"), I can definitely see this as a subtle, unstated/understated reason for looking at making such a switch.

Admins/mods, if I've hit too close to home in my secondary guessing and it's not something that you wanted released/discussed publicly, please feel free to nuke this post (although everything past the first paragraph would be better for me ).

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

13 minutes ago, darkchylde28 said:

I may be off base with this additional take, but reading between the lines a bit more, I believe the team may want to do so specifically to preserve and protect ownership rights of anything/everything discussed in the "official" VGS chat, so that a third party company whose chat platform was being used doesn't technically own the rights to mine, sell, etc., all of the data being shared back and forth between users in the VGS "owned" Discord.  You know, the way that all the data shared back and forth on NA was summarily owned by Dain and packaged up and sold to unscrupulous parties with less than zero notice to anyone else.

Yeah I definitely think you're reaching a bit there, especially since the switch to gather seems to only be related to game nights and other such events, whereas everything else is still taking place on the main Discord, but maybe I'm wrong, haha.

[Jeevan | 8,909]

Ok, so um, no lol

This was meant to be something fun was all really.  Basically in a nutshell it is zoom for people and it is like a mini game area, maybe idk, there is no real reason to the move except @Gloves as well as myself and @spacepup all thought it would be a neat platform to use.  There is no real hidden agenda here I swear.  It's just sorta neat, or at least I thought so.  We were thinking about diff. things we could do in here.  For example, we could create a maze for folks if you wanted to do a maze or something.  See who can get the fastest time, or just to do a maze.  Just something we thought might be, i guess, atmospheric for the vgs users.  

I just think it is a little better so people don't come in asking for others and just come in to interupt game night or whatever.  Not saying that that is bad, because we welcome new folks to game night.  I just think that added distractions can be negated by using gather.  

[Gloves | 11,761]

Lol.

Yeah Gather was just a fun thing that we came across. 

Here are some benefits in my mind for Gather compared to Discord:

1. Lower barrier to entry
   1. Not EVERYONE has a Discord, or wants to have one
   2. With Gather you just go to the url and pop in a name for yourself
2. Fun little traversable world
   1. We can build cool little atmospheric rooms and the like, tailor-built to specific purposes
   2. e.g. a "Game Room" can actually LOOK like a game room
   3. e.g. I've used it to run a work event, and I built a "dungeon" with a full-on maze; fun stuff!
3. Something to do "between rounds"
   1. Say we're playing Smash Bros and it's not your turn, you could walk around, maybe even go off to another room very temporarily w/ someone else to chat privately (winking emoticon)

That's it really.

Maybe it doesn't appeal to the group, maybe you hate it, maybe Discord is fine. That's cool too. We're just experimenting with something we thought was fun and engaging. If people don't like it, we can just use Discord again, no harm no foul.

[spacepup | 2,404]

@ZeldaFreak I'd encourage you to at least try it , and then give us feedback.  I mean, a bit unfair to knock it without even seeing what it's like, eh?

@darkchylde28 I don't think you meant any disrespect, so it's fine, but you are way off base.  Honestly, it has absolutely nothing to do with ownership, rights, content and future sales, etc. 

I can break it down pretty simply.  Gloves found out about this gather thing, sent me a quick message and said "hey, do you think this would be fun for game nights?" I checked it out and thought, oh, this looks kinda fun! Kinda like an old-school rpg or something - I think people will find it kinda neat and just something else fun to do for game nights, let's try it out.

So we tried it out.

Now, if people don't really like it, for technical reasons or otherwise, ok that's fine - but honestly, we actually thought people would find it very fun and cool, just something kinda "game-y" to make the experience more unique.  

There's no deeper meaning here, or reason for a delay in answering questions, or anything like that hahah

[Gloves | 11,761]

Well damn now this looks all coordinated lol.

[spacepup | 2,404]

Hahahah.  Surely they don't think we're that foolish eh? haha.

Anyway - yeah, we do appreciate the feedback.  We ask that maybe people give us a chance to just test it out a bit more and see if we can flesh it out a bit and make it a fun experience.  If people still don't like it, ok, that's fine, we can go back to discord or try something different!

We really just want to make game nights fun, and whatever we can do to improve that for the community, we can work on it.

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

2 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Well damn now this looks all coordinated lol.

HE'S GOT YOU AAAAAALL FIGURED OUT!

[SailorScoutMandy | 782]

Just my two cents but I think it's easy to use. Personally I had less issues with gather than I normally do with discord. Discord likes to disconnect me often and I have to restart the app and whatnot, didn't have to do this with gather. I think it's being over analyzed. 

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

13 minutes ago, spacepup said:

@ZeldaFreak I'd encourage you to at least try it , and then give us feedback.  I mean, a bit unfair to knock it without even seeing what it's like, eh?

Well yeah, like I said I'm not completely opposed to it, and like I said I hadn't tried it so people should take my criticisms with a grain of salt, I'm just not entirely convinced yet based on what I've heard about it. Maybe I'll hop on this game night ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᶦˢ ᶦᶠ ʷᵉ ᵃᶜᵗᵘᵃˡˡʸ ˢʷᶦᵗᶜʰ ᵍᵃᵐᵉˢ ᵗʰᶦˢ ᵗᶦᵐᵉ and try it out.