Welcome to Gaia! ::

Honestly I was heavy in the Leviverse for the longest time and it was only late in my high heyday that I ventured out, especially to LuBu. So I've got a lot of love for the big names of Leviathan Stadium, with a special nod to Shouyin. Dude was cocky and almost as abrasive as Vahn, both IC and (at times) OOC, but he ended up being Laz's confirmed rival, and yet still his brother.

Amusingly, this rarely became more than a minor annoyance to me in tournaments. Don't know if that's a matter of luck, something about Rayner's style, or just a matter of people enjoying it if you play them up and focus on what could be entertaining about a lopsided match-up. Rayner fought a lot of people who probably could or should have had him dead to rights before the fights even began, and I've never figured myself as more than a moderate "competitive text fighter". I did run into this issue in events; when the big bad is scaled up to take on 10 of Ryugi (would the plural of that be Ryugis or Ryugii? Ryuguys?) it takes 1 turn for them to fire giant burning sword lasers that level blocks, meanwhile my character is injured and would need more like 3 posts to find an opportunity to scale the giant thing, in order to try and approach a weak spot, and he'd need some lead up to finding a way to even do real harm unless the plan is "hope it has Shadow of the Colossus glowing spots/eyes I can climb to and stab".

But we're off track- I don't actually know that I have a solid answer for this because I actually have liked a lot of people- but it was rarely about the fighters. I liked unique, out there powers that made you think about things in different ways, but who do I remember ultimately, when I think about what excited me? People who did powerful dramatic writing, or were really delivering character front and center, even in "competition". The plot of a lot of these things was simple, even silly, but there could be a lot of deep stuff going on the personal level.

I mean, Vahn makes a good example that most people from back when probably know- we kind of hated each others guts for a while, but even then I enjoyed the writing.

Because ultimately we're writing free form- which is TERRIBLE for concrete conclusions and conflict resolution, so why focus so hard on the parts of the fights that this format is the worst at, instead of the parts that it can deliver on better than almost any other format?


But yeah, as I produce a text wall, I have to admit there's a real mixed bag there. I like character work and exploration/depth of thought, but while long a** posts never bothered me in my fights, there's a certain threshold that kills it when I try and read other fights- part of why I've read so few of Cog's fights, despite that we're pals and I like his ideas and character work.

I can't tell if you're serious or I'm missing the sarcasm font in there. But that's a lot of anecdotal evidence that's pretty much opposite my anecdotal evidence- I came in with a character designed partially to satirize common things players did on Gaia, bucking a lot of tropes, and the only people I was friends with initially violently disagreed with the groups I eventually spent more time around. But I found this neat trick that works in RP and real life, where most of the time if you're don't go out of your way to be abrasive, you get along with people better.

Some who otherwise would make fights devolve into NO U fests (because again,this is the dumbest format to write use for the purpose of definitively deciding a winner in a conclusive, impartial fashion) even become willing to lose if the fight isn't going their way, instead of rabidly clinging to that hope of victory. Because they're getting something else they enjoy out of this.

And let's be honest- if you're playing a character under the power curve, you're doing it to have fun and enjoy that character, or that challenge, and you're assuming you're going to lose more often than win. If you're not, you're either assuming you're way better than the other players and just want to storm around the kiddy pool, beating up the little people, or being kind of silly.