Let's Play Discussion Thread - Format, Length, Replies, Et Cetera

I don't care how hard it is. Make it interesting or I'm going to be bored. There are no points for effort, only entertainment value.

I think we pretty much agree on what LPs are, how they work, and what makes them interesting! I actually followed the Shinsengumi/IWD2 LP in the beginning and I really liked it - only stopped because the screenshots were taking way too long to load. To clarify, I HAVE seen narrative LPs of narrative-driven games that have been done well - this chilling retelling of Animal Crossing is one that springs to mind immediately - but you know, that's only if the person is actually writing it well. And too often, it isn't.

Sadly, not all LPers can be Angie or Matt. :(

I think LPs that try to have their own stories are "performances" in a sense. You call Angie and Matt "storytellers", LPs as tools for people to express their creativity. And what's wrong about judging a creative product? If you're going to write a story, or a fanfic, or a narrative LP, I should think that your readers have the right to dislike it if it's badly written. :/

And all of my LPs feature heavy audience interaction because I think that the audience SHOULD help shape the LP as well, whether it be by asking questions, or cracking jokes, or voting on choices and actions, or just REACTING, because that's what makes it fun! I think you got misled by my movie analogy - that was more directed towards the LPer than the audience of the LP.

EDIT: I also really enjoy gimmick LPs, especially if it's a game I've played before and I want to see a new twist on it! In fact I remember my very first LP here was incredibly, unnecessarily gimmicky...

Oh gosh, how did I not see this thread earlier?
Well, to start, I did a Katawa Shoujo LP (or tried to, but the game was a bit too long for my tastes), an Atashi no Riri LP, a Hierofania LP, and I'm working on playing a bunch of shitty games. I just put them all in one thread because they were so short.

I do like organization, but only if the thread is full of derails and strange things - I put an index into my latest LP mostly for my own use, but it could be useful if you only really wanted to see one of those games. I don't consider any of my threads to have any extreme derails in particular - with the exception of the Atashi no Riri thread, but that was after I finished the game.
I also like style in an LP. The content doesn't always matter to me; I like some LPs that are mostly commentary, and some that are mostly screenshots. But I want to be interested in what the LPer thinks when they do see something. I abandon ship as soon as I find myself scrolling aimlessly and reading the screenshots. I think a lot of this is what Anabanana said about honest reactions. I love a good joke as much as anyone, but sometimes just watching somebody flip out, die laughing, or cry over something is all I need to enjoy the moment.

My process for LPing is, and always has been, as follows:
1) Open the game
2) Open a word document
3) Write down what I think/my commentary/the LP, leaving small number notes to tell me where my screenshots go.
4) Look it over to make sure none of it is too horrendous.
5) Put in the images and post.

In that manner, I play large chunks of the game at once, because it's convenient. It also means that I have one of those stream-of-consciousness, often-retelling, why-can't-she-actually-LP-instead-of-just-playing-the-game kind of styles. I'd like to think that I'm funny, or that people enjoy my commentary, but I honestly don't know because EVERYTHING you say in the LP subforum will probably receive a few likes. Sure, it's nice, and I'm not saying it has to stop... But I used to have a much better idea of what was good and what was not.

I update whenever I have some free time. This, in the case of Atashi no Riri, can mean daily updates. It can also mean one every two weeks. I tend to play for at least half an hour to an hour whenever I do play, but it's not very consistent. I get distracted very often and listening to the same game music for two hours does not help.

The only real thing I dislike about LPs are the derails. I don't know about you guys, but if I'm sad after a sad update, I can look up my own kitten pictures. And after that, why are there sudden dog pictures and turtle pictures and duck pictures, and then before I know it it's more of an animal picture thread than anything? Then the LP has a shocking moment and there are SCREAMING GIFS EVERYWHERE. I can accept one per person. I can accept consecutive people screaming. I cannot accept consecutive people posting 5 gifs of them screaming, because then the page gets very long and many of the gifs are reused anyway.

For 2013: I promise that my next LP will have more of a story and direction. And less audience participation. And I'll try to play better games. I promise. Except for Kawaii Christmas.

I like completionist LPs if the completionist nature has a purpose. For example, this excellent Baldur's Gate Big World Project LP, where the premise of the LP is "let's install every Baldur's Gate II mod in existence and see what happens." For the average game, unless the dialogue is really good, I'd rather skip over the less important parts and get to the next bit of character or plot. In ADWR, I cut out at least half the dialogue in most scenes because a lot of it's just padded and redundant.

The reason I prefer SS LPs to video LPs is because you don't have to record (or read) every single second of the game, even the boring parts.

When I read LPs, the way I like them narrated depends much on the mood of the games being played. If the LPer is going blind and the meta-commentary isn't as much shoehorned jokes as actual reactions, then I can even disregard the mood of the game itself. However, if it seems too forced I'll just cringe and leave the thread, unless either the game is too good or the replies make it worth it.

I'm a big hypocrite too, since I am not fond of derails either yet I partake in them pretty often. I stop once I realize, though, because those things are, most of the time, destructive to the thread.

Not much more I can say about that I guess; I am an easily pleased person after all.

Now, on my view of the topic as the newbie LPer I am. I haven't been Let's Playing in here for more than... one week? So I don't really think I can really talk about what is better and such. I used to have LPs of a couple of Fire Emblem games in a spanish site, but I don't really consider them much. Mostly because I was a teenager and... didn't post content of much quality, to be honest. Currently I'm doing an Ever17 Let's Play.

What I've been doing so far:

1. Open the game, Wordpad and Greenshot
2. Type everything that doesn't go in the screenshots
3. Take screenshots when something meaningful happens
4. Type a small (two words maximum) memo of where the images should be, followed by a number
5. Stop before the number reaches 20, and cut it in a place that makes sense
6. Batch convert images to stop computers from exploding
7. Upload to Photobucket
8. Type a couple of dumb jokes and snark, taking care of not doing so in really serious moments
9. Revise it
10. Post it

I also created a discussion thread to keep the LP from being swarmed by spoilered posts. I've been tempted to summarize the inevitable padding, but it doesn't seem like a good idea, really. It isn't really a Dating Sim where events repeat with little variation, or a regular slice-of-life VN that is easy to summarize without breaking immersion or botching the story, so I think I'll just keep it all in.

I think once I complete the first route, I'll start indexing it, too. It is too big of a game to just leave it there for the people to wade through.

As I've mentioned above (and in the thread), I'm pretty new and open to suggestions in what refers to format and handling of the story. Even if I wasn't new, really, there is always much room for improvement.

I thought about doing a Star Control 2 LP, mainly because most of the folks who frequent the LP forum are younger and might not have played that game and I wanted to share my love for it. I'm sure all of the old timers have played it. Then I doubted myself, because surely everyone has played that game, right?

I am one of those younger people who has never even heard of that game.

Star what now?

Same. No idea what Star Control is.

I've considered doing LP's a couple of times now, but ultimately decided against it because I've tried on other forums and they take a LOT of work for me. However, a few LP's have led me to actually get a few games (including the Sims Medieval!), so that's pretty cool on its own.

There's not necessarily a style of LP I specifically prefer, since it really depends on the game, but I do know that I absolutely hate the otome game LP's where EVERY SINGLE DIALOGUE SCREENSHOT EVER gets included. This is especially true for visual novels; please summarize or I'd play the game myself!

Also, like Nebty, I've also fallen off of the LP-reading bandwagon for the most part. I think it started around the time the Harvest Moon LP's started to happen, when people would just do sequel after sequel of the same franchise and not really add anything interesting to the LP, like a personal touch. It seems more like "OH WELL IF THIS POKEMON LP IS SUCCESSFUL, I CAN DO THAT TOO WITH THIS OTHER POKEMON GAME" and that's really not how it works (that said, I really liked the Turnip vs... whoever the girl character was, Harvest Moon LPs). A good sequel game does not guarantee a good sequel LP.

Instead, I tend to pick LP's to read based on the author; currently the LP's I'm following are by Soli-chan, JudokaLilly, Elyscape, MulMizu, and Horrible Oscar. I'll also generally read anything by Angie, Matt, Rapunzel, gertrudetherobot, and Nute because I've really liked what they've done in previous LPs.

Holy crap you guys! Now I may have no choice.

It's perfect for an LP. And I, for one, will *enjoy the sauce*!

Quite possibly the worst LP mistake I made was to persist LPing The Last Express even when it became clear to myself that I wasn't enjoying it.

Well, scratch that. I wasn't enjoying LPing The Last Express.

I can honestly say I failed to deliver perhaps the biggest forte of the game: its sense of immersion. There is a degree of freedom and thrust in that game that many more recent games do not deliver. In real time, I can wander from passenger car to passenger car, eavesdropping on snippets of conversation -- be it the lesbian lovers, our Dear Comrade, or that damn kid who won't stop blowing his goddamn whistle -- without a nudge from the game. Well, at least until I get arrested (but don't worry, it got better: I took more characters with me to the end as the story progressed).

What I should have done -- other than just not LP the game -- would have been to record clips for Youtube, make some gifs, stop trying to narrate my thought-process too exactly. I didn't fully understand Robert's thoughts; trying to replicate that became futile. Add the lack of audience participation in a remarkably real-time environment crammed with voice acting but devoid of subtitles, and the typical LP structure collapses. I realized this, grew frustrated, but I still persisted, and it told.

I unfortunately like to LP games blind and post as I play, so trying to piece together a narrative from the given game won't work as well for me. With Lone Survivor (and I swear I'm going to update it, once this damned week is finished with), I'm trying to find the right balance of getting into the main character's head as well as voicing my own reactions. There won't be a Garry-character to hold my hand through this horror story. We'll see how well I fare.

Aww, thanks hun!

I've LPed Lucky Rabbit Reflex, (P)lanets and Love Revo.

For me, the thing that will turn me off of an LP the fastest is walls of screenshots, especially in Visual Novel threads. It isn't necessary and it is a bit overwhelming to tell you the truth. I try to keep my screenshots concise, though I do admit I sometimes fail at this. I actually found LPing (P)lanets really grueling because it WAS a straight up VN oddly enough. Well. that and the fact that every character in that game was a piece of shitty shit. ANYWAY - I'm still reading some LPs at the moment, but not as many as I was. I'm sure I'll phase in and out of that.

Psst, Rapunzel, I have a secret for you... Baldr Sky actually IS a soap opera. With giant frickin' robots in it! My not-so-secret shame is that I inherited my father's love of trashy romance novels, but since I'm such a tremendous nerd, I only read them in the form of foreign language visual novel game-things. Dad just buys bodice-rippers used from Half Price Books and pretends he got them for Mom, like a normal human being would do.

I feel an LP does work best when you have a spin or a gimmick on it - my favorite was participating in a Dwarf Fortress succession game back on Quarter to Three where I posted all my updates in the form of haiku. Not only was it fun for me, it drew in everyone else, and people commented on the progress by writing in haikus themselves.

I basically don't recommend doing a translation of a game as an LP, because it's a lot of work, and you tend to end up with something that's no more interesting than the source material at best. Most games, no matter their genre, don't look good when turned into a mixture of screenshots and dialogue transcriptions, and the work you do in translation tends to suck up the time and attention you would otherwise spend making the LP itself interesting. And, of course, translation is hard. Even professionals have a tough time converting a story from one language to another without losing the spark of the original. You're much more likely to get something worse than the original, with the best of intentions.

That's why I pretty consciously modeled my LP format on a TV show - I try to start and stop on cliffhangers, I preview scenes from the next episode to get people's attention, I hint at things that will eventually happen to the cast. It's because I realized, after a bit of work on the LP, that it could bog down and just be a transcription of the game - which is admittedly a pretty big accomplishment, given how much there is to transcribe, but still not a great experience for anyone else, and not fun for me either. I wanted to capture what I liked about the game, and the main thing I came up with is that feeling of "I want to know what's going to happen next." There's a lot of twists and turns and mind-screws in the story, and they come pretty fast when you're playing the game normally (i.e. not stopping to take screenshots and translate words). You might not get that in an LP, because it comes out in slow dribs and drabs. So I thought - what's a format that gets the audience excited about plot twists and future developments, given that the actual material comes out in measured installments?

The key is to think of the audience. Obviously you can't do an LP unless you're excited about the game, but coming up with a way to invite others in to share in the excitement is important. I knew that chapter previews were the right decision when I started looking forward to writing them and other people chimed in after each one to wonder what would happen next.

As far as process... I start doing each segment by opening Broken Forum in the browser on one half of my monitor and the game in the other half. I take screenshots and write the game up as I go, putting a little note in brackets where each screenshot fits - so I'll save a screenshot as "You Made Her Cry, You Big Jerk.jpg" and put [YOU MADE HER CRY, YOU BIG JERK] in the post. Then I upload everything in one fell swoop, replace the notes with links to the appropriate screenshots, and hit reply. I host everything on my own S3 account, so it's all hotlinked. (If you're curious, all 4 pages of screenshots together and the 1.5 gig demo I'm rehosting currently cost me $2 a month.) I tend to go forward at a steady rate, but I'll often scrub forward or backward with quicksaves if there's a section that I want to summarize or skip over. Since I've played the game before, I know which parts of the background detail are just background and which parts are actually Ominous Foreshadowing; otherwise I'd have trouble knowing what's safe to cut.

I try to take a decent balance of screenshots - I'll take a screenshot when the setting changes, a character enters or leaves the scene in a way not made obvious by the dialogue, or when a changed expression conveys important information. One tricky part is that visual novels are often very economical with their frames of animation - and sometimes take advantage of that; when you're actually playing, it's very obvious when a character changes a minor detail of their expression because nothing else on the screen changes. I just posted a scene where there's two screenshots that only differ by the presence of tears in a character's eyes, and it's hard to spot when you're scrolling through a post.

I set a schedule because it gives me a definite amount of time to use for each installment, and it's let me hit the right balance between things I do for pure relaxation and hobbies that also take some amount of work. 3 nights a week spent writing is about right for getting enough writing practice without losing patience.

Since I'm translating, obviously the translation is the hardest part! It's an interesting writing challenge. For example, I've apparently decided that one guy is from California, because he says "dude" a lot when I translate him to English. Another character is very polite with a good upbringing, and a preposition at the end of a sentence is a grammatical mistake up with which she will never put. There are a few lines where I'm very proud of coming up with a good turn of phrase that sounds like clear, native English while still conveying the original point. There are other scenes where I've struggled, like trying to come up with the right mix of rude slang for the dialogue of a group of bitchy high-school girls - it's been a long time since I overheard the flute section gossiping at band practice and I don't have a good ear for it. At the end of the LP, I'll probably write up translation notes for people who are curious.

OMG! It's like I'm internet famous! :D *wipes tears away* I want to thank my fans, mostly... I do it for YOU!

Oh, I forgot to mention how I write up an LP post.

Well, for Jigsaw I usually play a bit, then copy/paste some of the text into the reply box, go to google and search for an appropriate image, then type some commentary. Rinse and repeat until I get tired. Sometimes I look for images before I start writing up the post. Since I've played the game before I knew that, for example, I'd need an image of Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 for the next section. Finding the images is one of the most fun parts of the LP for me, actually. I get to research a lot of really interesting events and time periods.

The first LP I did was Aisle. People seemed to enjoy it. But by the end I had completely lost my steam for making up responses for people's custom commands, so I let it die on a high note.

The only LP I've ever given up on is my Adam Cadre one. There were a lot of factors in this decision; first, I realized that text adventure LPs with a lot of text are kind of a slog to read through. I'm okay with reading that amount of text when I'm actually playing a game, but having to read through paragraph after paragraph of small text in quote boxes followed by one comment is not a fun LP experience. There also wasn't much room for audience participation and I stopped having anything meaningful to say about the sad parts of Photopia. I definitely wasn't providing a more interesting experience than just playing the game. As for the others, the other Cadre I really love is Shrapnel, but playing through it I realized that the subject matter and the way it's formatted didn't suit an LP. Also, it's my only thread where the developer has posted, and that made me really nervous, to be honest. Like all my posts were being judged by the Eye of God. So, yeah. I let that one die.

The next one was Lost Silver, which was when the Pokémon threads were new and exciting. I don't mind all the ones we have, but I only follow a few of them now of them now, because they're ALL narrative LPs and that gets a bit tiresome when you have to keep track of 10 of them. Sometime I just like a straight commentary LP, y'know? I really like the writing style in the Platinum, Quartz, and Team Rocket ones, those are my favorite. Anyways, Lost Silver was very short and also a request, and was a lot of fun to do. I don't think I'd do another creepy pasta game, though, the joke wears off quickly.

The next finished LP was my *Mute/harem LP of Analogue: A Hate Story. This one was because a lot of people wanted to see *Mute's route after the other LP finished, and I thought it would be fun to do a B-side LP of sorts where I wouldn't have to LP the entire thing, just what the other one left out. I also just sincerely love the game and wanted to share it with other people and see their reactions and foster discussion, which I think it succeeded at.

The game I've currently got going with Edelweiss is Castle Chase. It's my only really Otome-dating-gameish LP, but it has the benefit of not being a visual novel, which means there's more to do than just hit dialogue options. The commentary is mostly my own reactions to it, and reading this thread I wonder if I've really added enough of "myself" into it to make it stand out, but people seem to enjoy it. Having a partner to share the LP load will help with this, hopefully, so people won't have to read just my writing style for all 10 routes.

My LP process is I play through an update (and I like to do long updates), write the commentary as I take the screenshots, and then play through it again while I work on the update. This lets me remember what order the images went in, because sometimes they'll get mixed up, keeps my comments fresh in my mind, and lets me revise the ones that weren't as funny the first time. It's a bit slow, but it works for me. I update when I feel like I have something amusing to say; if I start the game and play for 5 minutes and can't think of a single thing to say, I shut it off and wait to update.

What I've learned from LPing is that I'll only LP a game if it's the right kind. There's lots of games, like Cute Knight Kingdom and Recettear, that I love and would like to share with you guys but that simply wouldn't work with my LP style. I also don't know if I could do a proper narrative LP, which is why I avoid games that don't lend themselves to commentary.

For LPs I like, I like it when the screenshots are clean and easy to read, when the text is either all shown or summarized attractively, when the LPer has interesting commentary besides just "LOOK AT THIS, THIS HAPPENED" or when the narrative they're writing is interesting to me and well-written. Honestly, the way it looks has a lot to do with it: if the game you're playing is nice to look at, you've formatted your text (both summarizing and commentary) in a readable way, that goes a long way. Other than that, it really just depends if the game is my kind of thing. I've kept reading LPs with minimal commentary just because I wanted to see where the game was going, and I've given up on well-done LPs just because the game wasn't holding my interest. I also don't usually read threads where the person is translating the game, because I feel weird getting the story second-hand and I'm always afraid they'll give up halfway through because it's too much work when I'm already engrossed. I applaud those doing them, though; it must take a ton of work.

I really should mind GIFS more, because they slow down my tablet, but I don't. I didn't realize other people did, so I shall try to keep them to a minimum in my replies if other people have already posted some. Thank you, thread! And I agree with the Zafehouse LP being one of the best on the forum right now, it's by far my favorite. It's a perfect combination of audience participation, commentary, interesting game, and interesting narrative.

ETA: Also, background info! Please, please, please include SOMETHING before just jumping into the screenshots. Who the hell are you? Why should I care? What the fuck is this? These are all questions that can be answered in a simple first post! A quick summary of the game, your playing experience with it, what you thought about it if you've played it before, how the gameplay works, what the format and tone of the LP will be: all of this is the first step for developing a strong and interesting voice for your commentary and narrative. Also, if you're playing a game with a lot of repetitive sequences, please summarize the end result instead of screenshotting and attempting to comment on every battle. "We got attacked again! And then we won!" is not interesting; your LP will improve at least 75% if you only show us the interesting, plot-relevant parts.

No, not really. If i read LP of a game, it's to get an idea what that game is like. That includes plots and characters, especially in games which have these as major focus. So if you replace these with some shit of your own, the LP no longer provides me with what i want from it.

If the game provides only basic framework and expects the player to fill it with their own plot and characters (like the Sims or the older RPGs) then it's another matter obviously. But if your "LP" makes you ignore or worse yet, contradict what the game is about? Label it a fanfic not an LP, at least.

What are people using to create screenshots? What's your workflow? Is there some good tool out there, or are you just CTRL-PRNT SCRNing it and pasting into Paint?

If it's a PC game, I'm running FRAPS (as I am in Icewind Dale 2), or I use Steam's built-in screenshot tool (for Shogun 2: Total War).
If it's a PSP game, I've got custom firmware loaded that lets me take screenshots, and then copy them off the PSP to a PC. They're in .bmp at that point, so I run Irfanview to convert them en masse to JPEGs, and then I sort through them to see which ones I use.

Print screen has worked fine for me so far because the games I played were rather simple (Amsterdam) or so modern that pressing the button sends an already JPEG converted shot to a game specific folder (DA2). Generally speaking, especially if it's image-heavy, JPEG is the way to go, though admittedly half the Amsterdam LP ended with PNG because I forgot to change the default setting in Paint when cropping the screenprint.

I started off my A Dance with Rogues LP with JPEGs, and then realized a short while in that the text was blurry around the edges. I switched to PNGs and it's much easier to read. So I'd suggest taking a few screenshots in different formats and seeing what works best for the game.

I'm playing Jade Empire via Steam, so I pretty much just keep my finger poised on the F12 key, which saves the caps as JPEGs to a screenshot folder for that game, conveniently filenamed with the date and image number. Once I've selected the screencaps I'm using, I resize them in Paint Shop Pro (which is also what I use on the occasions that I cheat and composite screenshots together, despite my having used the word "Photoshop" as a verb previously) and save them into a separate folder for the LP with filenames sorted by chapter and image number.

With TMGS2, though, I have to Print-Scrn and paste into Paint Shop Pro, then save it as a JPEG into an LP folder. I usually copy-paste a cap for every screen of dialogue in a scene, line them up in the PSP window, and then pick through and save the ones I plan to use and discard the rest.

I'm sorry. I sort of skimmed through this because I am determined to stay awake until it is a reasonable time to sleep. Hahahaha why is everything blurring together?

I'm going to follow the OP format for ease.

What I've Written
What is Love? Baby Don't Hurt Me~ Let's Play Yandere-chan!
And I'm currently working on I like big swords and I cannot lie, Let's Play Final Fantasy VII

How I Write
I have the game running on the right of my screen and a word document opened on my left. I also have photoshop in one corner, some stickie notes, and the internet lurking behind everything. Yes. I have problems. I take screenshots and slide them directly into the word doc. I pause the game and write in whatever commentary I'm adding. I unpause the game and continue playing. So, as I'm writing, I really don't know what's going to happen next. I usually only change things around if some comment contradicts information from the game or sounds better placed a few screenshots down. If I have enough for a post I typically make that post immediately.
It can be a bit of a hassle doing it that way but it feels, I dunno, honest? I like diving in and being in character and that what I hope happens every time I boot up a game. So far, I like writing in character. It allows me to practice writing in first person and I hope it helps with immersion. Maybe not and maybe not everyone likes that.
I'm trying to be a lot more in character for my current LP than I ever was for my previous. I'm not sure if it'll work out.
I'm a bit of a goof and a dork. Cloud's not.

Also: For my current LP I'm using a Mac hot key for screen capture. It's COMMAND+SHIFT+4. What's nifty is that I can then select an area and WHAMO. Instant already cropped screenshot. YAY.

Things I Like About Let's Plays
I tend to read and like LPs that I either A) Cannot play (for various reasons) or B) Really like what the LPer brings to the game experience. I lean more towards the latter than the former. Humor is a fantastic but not required. I enjoy people's reactions to the game whether it is in character or purely the LPer's opinions.
I like some audience participation. I like reading people snarking and posting their opinions. There is a point where it can become a derail but I guess it shouldn't happen too much if updates are regular. Maybe.

Things I Don't Like About Let's Plays
I'm sure people have already mentioned things I've said and things I'm about to say.
I don't care much for every bit of text having a screenshot. I like prefer text to either to be left out (if inconsequential), typed out, or summarized. The last one not so much unless I feel like the LPer is good at summarizing but that's a very personal judgement.
I don't like for the entire update to be a wall of text.
"But Rot, you've read and liked text adventure LPs! STUUUPID."
Well, yeah. But a lot of them have spent a bit of time googling some pictures. I love reading but my eyes are pieces of crap that I'd trade for cybernetic implants any day. Pretty pictures give my eyes a bit of a break. Also, I admit I tend to abandon things quickly if the paragraphs are too big for the same reasons. I lose my place a lot and few are worth that headache and frustration.
I also don't care much for the huge derails but we've pretty much solved that issue.
It's also a little annoying when people start multiple LPs and then basically abandoning an old one. I want to be able to follow an LPer through a game from start to finish. Starting multiple and never finishing any just makes me sad. And I'll probably stop reading any LPs that person does.

Note
^Lame title. I know.
Anyway, I'd like to put out that I'm always open for suggestions from people on what I can do to make reading the LP more enjoyable. As long as you're not being a jerk about it I enjoy getting feedback.(Rot, you a**hole, stop posting so many **** screenshots we don't need to see every ****ing movement. GOD.)
I find the use of god very offensive. ;)

In Closing
I like the majority of the people on the forum and think this is an amazing group of people. Just because I don't/won't/haven't read your LP doesn't mean I hate you. I can't read as fast as some of the people on here so I've got to be selective with my time. I tend to not read LPs of people I'm not familiar with which is terrible. How do I social.


tl;dr LPs are great fun but let's not get carried away in some aspects and do mine suck then I'm sorry and people are cool here and something.

GOD, Rot, you a**hole, stop posting so many ****ing words and put up more **** screenshots. WORST LP EVAR.

I think you've read some of my Jigsaw LP (I can never really be sure but I tend to go off likes/comments as an indicator of who reads it). What did you think of what I did there? I do incorporate pictures, but there's a lot of text. I try to keep walls of text to a minimum because I completely understand what you mean. My eyes start glazing over if I just see a huge pile of words and no paragraphs. I know text adventures aren't the easiest things in the world to read, so I tried to make my LP as easy on the eyes as possible.

GOD **** it OZZO, you *****. I ****ing TOLD YOU. AGRH.
Excuse me while I CRY FOREVER.

And while we're at it...
OZZO. UPDATE **** YOU!. I want to know what happens to Foreveralone man~


I had a feeling I was asking for it when I wrote that down. XD

I don't think it's been too bad. I need to play some catch up since I haven't been reading LPs as vigorously as I had like, a month ago. You might be doing things a bit different from where I left off? I remember thinking I'd like a few more pictures possibly but I wasn't dying.
I'm not exactly the picture of coherency at the moment so you may want a second opinion. Or maybe a lucid opinion from me at a later time. I dunno.

Somewhat related question that I wish to posit/pose/something to various persons, what kind of comments do LPers want in their thread?
I'm a little curious about this now since I think I recall reading dissenting opinions in this here thread.



Sorry for double posting normally I check to see if there's any activity before I post but then I didn't and so this happened.
And I checked this time.

Honestly I'm happy the way my threads seem to go normally where people comment on what's happening, point it out if I made some sort of egregerious spelling error (since I just write directly into the browser without spellchecking), remark on particularly amusing/horrifying screenshots or as the case is in DA2, analyze and discuss the general material the update covered. I don't hugely mind discussions about what happens later, either, really, because the way the game is structured it tends to point towards future events if you know what's coming. So long as it's in spoiler tags, I am fine with it.

Thanks for the feedback. I try to have at least one per update, but the really image-heavy posts are when I'm exploring a new area and want to give some establishing shots of where we are. Since we're usually in a specific place and time I try to find real images of that place.

I like pretty much anything, really, other than stuff that's blatantly off-topic. I really enjoy it when people talk about the game, how they've been enjoying/not enjoying certain aspects of the LP, characters they liked or didn't like, stuff like that. I like my LPs to be more of a conversation than me just playing the game and people liking my posts. A single comment is worth a dozen likes.

Says the woman who has seven thousand of them. Not all of us are as wealthy as you, Ms. Moneybags.

Shut up Mitt.
;)

My one bit of feedback for all of you:

If you are playing a full screen game, please, please go easy on the screenshots. If you can't go easy on the screenshots, spoiler tag at least most of them. This makes your posts a billion times more readable, stops browser crashes, etc. A ton of screenshots isn't really a problem when they're the little DS type ones, but full screen PC RPGs and stuff, if you screenshot everything it can make posts really difficult to deal with, especially on mobile browsers.

That's... actually a really, really good idea. Can someone tell me how you give a spoiler tag a headline, though? Some stuff in the updates is in tags already because it's skirting NFSW and if I went back and tagged everything, it might get confusing.

Basically in the bracket you would say spoiler="Text goes here" instead of just spoiler. Like so:

Thank you, both! I... will start fixing up the DA2 LP. With luck it will stop it crashing in my own browser, too.

38 pages. This... might be a while.

I've purposely kept my screenshots in Shogun 2 to a minimum because of this, and in IWD2 I've kept the resolution down.

I was wondering if I might impose upon someone with a slow browser because my phone is usually fine with any LP loading and my laggiest browser is currently on a prolonged fail-streak and is not cooperating. Basically, can you go to page 4 of the DA 2 LP and tell me if your browser is okay with loading it? I put all of the proper updates in tags, so the longest picture series in plain sight on it is the Hawke-cavalacade. I basically want to know if putting the biggest ones in tags is enough or if I have to do it to every single image so it loads properly.

Thank you.