#ignore like 900 of them they are old blogs from 10 years ago that are dormant

[milkywayan]

Just reached 1.3k followers!

how did that happen???

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Hey, how do you and other Krexie shippers work around the age gap? I mean, I ship Krexie and have my own headcanons, but I'm curious to see what others have done.

I feel like I answered this before several months ago, but I don’t feel like finding that post so I’ll answer again. The full answer to your question is a short essay (and that’s without including the footnotes) so I’m gonna put it under a cut. This is based upon my own experience in the fandom, and the krexie circles I frequent are the ones on FFN, AO3, and of course, here on tumblr. Abuse and grooming (in the context of real people) will be talked about below the cut.

TL;DR I’ve seen three main ways of dealing with the age gap: ignoring it, aging Krel up, and aging Douxie down.

Ignore It

This one actually encompasses two different methods. The first of the two is to treat one or both of the boys’ ages as nebulous, with the maturity level of “teenager” and nothing more explicit since Douxie is about nine centuries old and Akiridion royals live for centuries Krel’s exact age is unknown. In this case, the age of one or both of the boys won’t be mentioned aside from being hundereds of years old. In addition, at least on Douxie’s end, this is somewhat canon. Fun fact: Douxie never calls himself a college student, and neither does Archie. Likewise, neither of them call Douxie 19. That was Steve, who deserved far better of a character arc than just to be the idiot that he is in Wizards. However, even though he deserved better Steve is not a reliable source of information on Douxie’s age, but Douxie and Archie are. In Wizards, the only information Douxie and Archie give on Douxie’s age is that he’s about nine centuries old.[1]

The other method of ignoring the ages is to treat Douxie as a 19-year-old (ignoring the immortality) and Krel as a 16-year-old, and to mention one or both of their ages. Their ages are ignored due to one or both of the following reasons: for one, in real life a three year gap between teenagers doesn’t automatically mean the older person is a predator. It’s something to be cautious about, and the younger person really needs to have people they can trust since if the relationship does turn toxic they would have less power and thus be in more danger (usually, though it is possible for the younger person to be more dangerous to the older one), but that doesn’t automatically mean something bad will happen. The other reason to ignore the boys’ ages is because honestly? If someone needs non-canon ships to tell them which relationships are healthy and which ones are dangerous, then their parents/guardians and teachers have failed them. Fanfic authors, fanartists, and other people creating/consuming fanworks on the internet are not responsible for educating random people on the internet. In fact, they and their content are not responsible for if a random person is abused, even if the abuser uses fanworks to groom the victim. It’s the fault of the abuser for being abusive.[2]

Out of these two methods, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more using the former method of ignoring than the age gap than the latter.

Age Krel Up

This, again, has two different methods. The more common method is to have Krel (and the other Arcadia Oaks High students) age naturally, until they’re at an age that the fanwork creator is more comfortable with having krexie at. These types of fanworks take place years after the events of Wizards. The other method is to create an au where Krel (and likely the other Arcadia Oaks High students) were already the age the fanwork creator is more comfortable with when Douxie and Krel first met. I, personally, have created a lot of content for the first method, and I’ve seen other people use this method as well. My fake marriage au utilizes the latter method, and this method would also work for au’s where Douxie and Krel are both adults when they meet but the au does not follow canon.

Age Douxie Down

This one also has a basis in canon, though I haven’t seen any other krexie shipper use this method of dealing with the age gap. I, personally, use this whenever I want to make krexie content that’s compliant with Trollhunters and 3Below but also do not want to deal wit backwards time travel because I hate backwards time travel. However, someone should write an au where Douxie and Krel are human high schoolers whose biggest problem is being gay for the guy attending your rival school.

Now, while Douxie and Archie gave Douxie the vague age of about 900 years old and Steve made the assumption that Douxie was a 19-year-old college student, Trollhunters actually went out of its way to show that Douxie was a high school student.

In season two episode 10, Mary reveals that she was dating a student from Arcadia Oaks Academy, and Eli remarked that that was their rival school. I was in high school when Trollhunters was airing, and let me tell you: high schools do not have rivalries with colleges. Arcadia Oaks Academy would have to be a high school, or maybe a k-12 or 6-12. However, it’s far more likely that Arcadia Oaks Academy is a high school with the same age range of students as Arcadia Oaks High. In season three episode 1, Mary excitedly tells Claire that a student from Arcadia Oaks Academy is at Arcadia Oaks High. This student is Douxie, and unless I’m remembering wrong he also mentions attending the Academy. Unless Mary knew all along that Douxie was a wizard and was trying to give him a cover story for why he was hanging out at Arcadia Oaks High only for this information about Mary to be cut from Wizards due to time constraints, there is absolutely no reason for Mary to lie about Douxie’s age to Claire. The fact that Douxie was considered to be a high schooler by most of the fandom (some people had been on the train of “he’s a centuries old adult” for a long time) is why the krexie fanworks created pre-Wizards are all treating Douxie like a high schooler. (Yes, people shipped krexie (or at least consumed/produced fanworks for the ship) before Wizards came out. I have my fic on AO3/FFN and other people’s comments to prove it, as well as some fanart saved to my blog. Sadly, some of the people are now antis, and one them has now harassed at least one krexie shipper.)

Personally, when I age Douxie down, I age him down to 17. Only 17. Not 17-plus-several-centuries-without-aging. In-universe he may try to call himself 1492 years old, but he’s really just 17. However, as I mentioned before, if I’m aging him down to 17 then I’m also completely ignoring the backwards time travel aspects of Wizards. And, by doing that, I end up really changing the lore of Wizards. If you would like more information for the timeline I use when I age Douxie down, please refer to this ask.

In Conclusion

Thank you for reading this. These footnotes aren’t nearly as on topic and are more of a ramble.

[1] Re: Douxie having a really vague age of nine centuries. If you take enough chemistry and physics (but in my experience especially chemistry) courses, you will have it drilled into your head that 900 years old could really be anywhere from 850 to 949 years old. So, while 919 is definitely possible in the age range given by the age of “about 900″, it’s really a give-or-take number. However, if we truly want to be accurate, then if we choose to have Trollhunters take place in the 2016-2017 school year, choose to have had the moppet been between 16 and 19 years old at the Battle of Killahead Bridge, and we consider that the late 12th century (aka the time period of Wizards... supposedly, considering that it is not historically accurate) to be the latter half of that century, then Douxie would have to be somewhere between 834 and 886 years old. If we want a 16-year-old moppet and for the 900 years to be an accurate case of rounding, then the Battle of Killahead Bridge would have needed to be in 1183 at the earliest, which is accurate for the description of late twelfth century. If Douxie were to really be 919 in 2017, then the Battle of Killahead Bridge would have needed to take place somewhere from 1114 to 1117, aka the early twelfth century.

[2] Re: the argument that fanwork creators are not responsible for if an abuser uses their content to groom a victim. When I was a kid, the big scare was that strangers would lure off innocent children with candy. We were told not to go anywhere with a stranger, even if they had candy (or puppies, kittens, etc.) I don’t know how many kids have been hurt by strangers promising candy, nor do I know if this is something kids are still being warned about, but I do know that there isn’t some campaign against candy companies for daring to sell candy that an abuser would use against kids. This is because, as horrible as children being hurt is, it’s not the fault of the candy companies. It’s the fault of the abuser. And likewise, it’s not the fault of a fanwork creator if someone else uses their content to harm others.

PS: A side note since we’re discussing ages. I’ve been in this fandom for years, specifically on tumblr, AO3, and FFN as well as one of the discords. It wasn’t until the krexie discourse started that I started seeing people start calling Krel 14. I had seen people call him 15-16 in the past, because the fandom wasn’t sure if he and Aja were twins or had a minimum of a 9-month gap (assuming, of course, that Akiridions reproduce like humans do). That being said, before the discourse I never saw anyone treat Krel (or Aja, for that matter) like he had a canonical age. 14, however, seems to be something that stemmed from the wiki. You know, the same fan-run wiki that claims that Nomura’s full name is Zelda Nomura even though nowhere in the shows, books, games, or graphic novels is she ever called by that name. Yeah, the Arcadia Oaks-Pedia is not a reputable source. I’m going to give the wiki editors the benefit of Hanlon’s razor and hope that they were just going “well, since Krel is Aja’s younger brother and we’re assuming she’s 15-16 years old like the rest of the protagonists he must be 14-15 years old” and it was only after that that antis took the idea of Krel being 14 as canon and then ran off with it to be cruel and cause chaos.

[rebeccahpedersen]

Learning A Transitioning Market Is Not Easy

TorontoRealtyBlog

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a seller, a buyer, or an agent – learning a transitioning market isn’t easy.

Now to be fair, a lot of the people who fail to learn do so out of ignorance, or refusal.  It’s not easy for a seller to accept that they would have sold their house for a higher price in February, and still pull the trigger in June.

But as the spring market looks to summer, I don’t know who looks more foolish: the stubborn seller, or the ignorant one.

Change is something a lot of people are inherently bad it.

Personally, I’ve never been good with change.

Big or small, I hate change, in every way imaginable.

I remember being 11-years-old when my father came home and told us that he had bought a new home, which was much bigger, and in a better area.  I cried uncontrollably for three hours, and was anxious every day for weeks.  When the “FOR SALE” sign went up on our lawn, I got a hammer out of the garage, knocked it off its post, and hit it around the side of the house.

We moved eventually, and the house was incredible, as was the area, and the street.  But in that moment – being told a massive change was coming, I was completely unwilling to accept it.

Big or small, I hate change.

I’m writing this from my dining room table, where I write most of my blogs.  I’ve sat in the same chair for six years, and my wife just moved the table against the wall so we can have more room for our 7-month-old daughter to play, and I’m losing my mind.  I feel lost on the other side of the table, in a different chair.

Anyways, that’s all besides the point.

Not all change happens immediately, overnight, or on the spot.

Some changes take time, and happen slowly, and that period is called a “transition.”

I’m not sure which change is tougher to accept: the one that happens right away, or the one that takes place slowly.

Perhaps with the former, you have more time to act in denial.

The Toronto real estate market has changed, and is changing as we speak.

Houses are still selling, prices are still up 15% on the year, and the market is still a seller’s market.

But we’re a long way from what transpired in January and February of this year.

As I’ve written on TRB over the past two months, and showcased in some of my Pick5 videos, single-family homes are no longer selling for 161% of the list price, nor are they getting 10-15 offers, each and every time the sign goes up on the lawn.

And remember when crummy CityPlace condos, listed at $379,900, were getting six offers?  That was an interesting time…

I’ve posted a few blogs on the “listing and re-listing,” as I call it, when houses come out at a low number, hold back offers, don’t sell, and are then subsequently re-listed higher days later.  But now I want to give you an example, just to show you exactly what’s going on in this transitionary market, and just how ignorant or careless some sellers are being.

But first, consider the following:

1) The price a house is worth. 2) The price a seller wants for the house. 3) The price the market will bear for the house.

Once upon a time, #1 and #3 were the same.

“A house is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it,” the infamous real estate adage goes.

Whether the market is hot or cold, we can argue that a house is truly only worth, or worth as much as, a buyer is willing to pay.

Today, that might not be relevant, as I’ll explain when we talk about houses that are actually under-listed, but don’t get any offers on “offer night.”

As for #2, that’s also an interesting intersection of today’s market, since, for a long time, the sellers had absolutely no idea of what price they wanted for their homes.

When the market was at the peak of insanity, I was having trouble getting sellers to believe me when I told them how much I thought we could get for their properties, or even on offer night, when I called and said, “Our highest offer is for $681,0000,” the seller, who thought his property was worth $500,000 three months earlier, would say, “This is a joke, right?”

So whereas in a hotter market, #1 and #3 were more than #2, it seems today, the opposite is true.

Many sellers want and/or need to sell, and will do so in current market conditions.  They’re not looking forward, not looking ahead, but rather working in the current market.

Then some sellers are stuck in yesteryear, refusing to acknowledge that prices are actually down from earlier in the year.

I’ve never seen this level of willful ignorance, nor have I seen this level of greed.  The entitlement bears mention as well, as many sellers feel that having owned a house in March, entitles them to March’s price, today.

I told you the story a couple of weeks ago about a house on which I bid in Leslieville, listed at $799,900, for which my clients offered $900,000.  That house was re-listed for $1,050,000.

But that’s nothing compared to what I saw last week.

Another house, which we’ll just say is in the city, was listed for $899,900.

I had clients looking in this area, who are merely starting their search, and I told them, “There’s a house that’s up for sale, taking offers tomorrow night, that will not sell, and will be re-listed higher.  I think we should go have a look, just as an exercise.”

Disect what I just said, and it seems odd.

The house is for sale, but I know it’s not going to sell on offer night, and is going to be re-listed higher?

Why?

Well, three reasons:

1) The sellers likely want far more than the current market will bear. 2) The listing agent is playing a game that nobody wants to play. 3) The buyer pool want to know what the house is actually worth.

And that’s another distinction we need to make here.

Part of the reason why all these houses are being listed and then re-listed, after they don’t sell on offer-night, is because the buyers know there’s a built-in “Plan B” to re-list.

It’s at that point, that the seller has to essentially take off the disguise, and tell the market what price they really want for the home.

So with respect to this house I was showing last week, I told my buyers, “This house is worth more than $899,900, no question.  It’s a semi-detached, 3-bed, 3-bath, with parking, fully renovated; it’s a million-dollar house for sure.”

My clients’ budget is somewhere in the $900’s.  As with most buyers, they probably want to land under $950,000, but they can go to $1M if need be.

I wanted to show them this house, not only to introduce them to the area, and show them a particular style of home I thought they might like, but also, as I said, as an exercise in what’s going on in today’s market.

It’s one thing to have money, and another thing to be an active buyer, but navigating this transitioning market is not something every buyer is ready for.

We went and took a look at the house, and it was a very nice renovation, but extremely poorly presented.

I know I’m going against some of my own advice here, when I tell buyers to “look past” certain things, but it’s tough to do when your first impression is the old sh!tter sitting on the front lawn:

A million-dollar-house, you say?

It sure didn’t present like one.

There were so many careless and lazy elements of this listing.

Little things – like leaving fluorescent light bulbs in the garden:

It’s just really careless.

But why amateur-flippers finish 98% of the job and then list in a hot market, is a topic for another day, and one we’ve covered many times.

Suffice it to say, there were urine stains on the marble tile in the bathroom, the sellers were too lazy to peel off all the stickers on the new Pella windows, and it was quite evident that the listing agent couldn’t be bothered to drive 45-minutes into the city to check up on his/her listing, as nothing had been updated, cleaned, or rearranged after a slew of agents and buyers had trekked through.

In any event, the intrinsic value of this house was at least $1,000,000.

And yet I showed this house to my clients, when it was listed at $899,900, at 7pm on the very night of offers, and by the time they showed up at 7pm, I had just spoken to somebody at the listing brokerage who told me there were zero registered offers.

I told my clients, “We’ll keep an eye on this one, and see what they re-list for,” the same thing I had told them the day before, in anticipation of this very result playing out.

I figured they would re-list around $1,049,000, or $1,079,000, but I held out hope that they really needed to sell, the house would be re-listed for $999,000, and my clients might have a shot within their budget.

The next day, I couldn’t find it in “My Favourites” on MLS.

I thought it had disappeared.

But evidently, I just never thought to scroll down – way down, down there: towards the properties priced around……………..wait for it……………$1,330,000.

Yes, $1,330,000.

The increase in price on this home was nearly 50%.

And what astonished me more than the new $1,330,000 list price was the fact that, at some point, the seller and/or the listing agent thought that somebody would pay 150% of the list price for this home.

Why not just list the house for $1?

And now, the property will sit, likely for weeks, possibly for months, as the sellers lament the cruel market that surrounds them.

In reality, they never should have under-listed at $899,900 in the first place, but rather should have listed for a price that reflects #2 on our list above: the price that they want for the home.

Because I believe that the new $1,330,000 list price reflects a built-in “negotiating cushion” that they, for some reason, felt they needed.

Sellers in today’s market need to realize that they can no longer expect to under-list their properties for a price that often seems to be selected at random, have a windfall of offers on their pre-selected date, and then sell for a price that was nowhere near their expectations – because they never had any expectations to begin with.

Many buyers are now waiting to see what the re-list prices are, before they consider making offers on houses.

Welcome to the Summer, 2017 market, folks.

We’re in a transition, and so many sellers just refuse to accept market conditions for what they are…

The post Learning A Transitioning Market Is Not Easy appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

Originated from http://ift.tt/2tLU69M

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

TLDR.jpg (Also note: This gigantic lore-lump is just for choosing your character's sex.)

"Too long. Lose half." "Which half?" "The half that you don't need." - Their Finest

My whole career has been based on writing very story-heavy games, with lots of words. Our company, Spiderweb Software, is small. We can't afford fancy graphics, so we have to rely on words. Interesting, quality words.

We're currently remastering the series with our most loved story and our bestest words. We also finished a new series, which had a lot of words which I suspect weren't as good because it didn't sell as well. Now we're planning a whole new series, and we need to figure out how many and what sort of words to cram into that.

We have a lot of decisions to make, so I've been thinking a lot about words in games. I have made a number of observations.

For Reference

A decently sized novel contains about 100,000 words. The Bible contains about a million words.

My wordiest and most popular game, Avernum 3, which I am now remastering, had about 200,000 words. At its release, people talked about how very, very, many words it had. Yet, by current standards, it is very terse.

In comparison, one of the best-written RPGs in recent times, The Witcher 3, had about 450,000 words. For The Witcher 3, "best-written" means "One really good storyline and many, many other storylines that were basically OK." (To be fair, I think the Heart of Stone DLC was really well-written.)

The word bloat continues. While Divinity: Original Sin had a mere 350,000 words, Tyranny spent 600,000 words telling the story of how you became the word's most evil middle manager, on a bold quest to try to tell apart the game's 73 factions.

And this is positively tongue-tied next to Torment: Tides of Numenara's 1,200,000 words. I admit I am curious about what story is so gigantic and epic that it requires 3 times more words than The Lord of the Rings. I will never find out, as there is nothing that will tempt me to play a game with 1.2 Bibles worth of text.  

This is me playing your RPG lol.

Vogel's Laws of Video Game Storytelling

1. Players will forgive your game for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.

2. When people say a video game has a "good story," what they mean is that it has a story.

3. The story of almost all video games is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." This almost never leads to a good story.  

For reference, this is how to get me to read the text in your RPG.

Observations About Words In Video Games

1. For a while, there was a big demand for games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. That is, old-school icon-based RPGs with big stories, told in lots and lots of words. Early hits, like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity made a lot of money off this demand. Sales of later games in this style, like Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara suggest that this pent up demand has largely been satisfied.

2. It's really easy to make words. Really, really, really easy. Any writer with half a grain of skill can spew out 500,000 like it is nothing. And if that writer's fingers get tired, an intern with aspirations of authorhood will chip in 100,000 more. And when that intern passes out, you can let your Kickstarter backers add words to your game and they’ll pay you for the privilege.

3. No, really, think about that last point. People will pay you to be able to write for your game! Adding words to your game has negative cost! Think about this the next time someone tries to use a giant word count to sell you a game.

4. The secret of great writing is not adding words. It's cutting them. You can almost always improve your writing by slashing chunks out of it and refining the rest. However, as game development is done with limited budgets and limited time, this editing process almost never takes place.

5. When a writer gets famous, they stop being edited. This is why the fifth Harry Potter book is 900 pages in which only like two things happen. This is also why, when a game in 2017 is written by a Big Name and has a script with one bajillion words, most of those words are going to be pretty boring.

6. There are well-written games. Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3 are solid. I remember Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment were all right, but I played those 20 years ago, and there may be a lot of nostalgia in play there. (For me and almost everyone else.) Planescape was cool, but I definitely remember blasting past a lot of text just to get through it.

7. Sturgeon's Law is in play here: "90% of everything is crap." For every Planescape: Torment, where they had a cool setting and story idea and really put the time in to write good text and have it interface with the gameplay well, there have been nine other games where they just threw up a bunch of Tolkein-light Kill-that-Bad-Guy stuff and hoped it stuck. It didn't.

8. Having lots of lore in your game is OK. Some players really love lore. But then, a lot of players really don't. I think it's best if you try to keep your lore separated a bit from the significant game text, like Skyrim putting the stuff in books you could easily ignore. World of Warcraft quest windows did this perfectly. All of the lore was in one lump ("You mean dwarves like to dig mines? WOAH!"), and the actual text of the quest ("Kill 10 goblin toddlers.") was broken out of it so you could digest it quickly.

9. Humor is very hard to write well. It is also one of the most enjoyable things to read. If you can make your game genuinely funny, people will love it forever. (The actual gameplay of Psychonauts was only B-, but people LOVE that game because of how funny it is.)

10. The ultimate goal of writing in a game: Have it be good enough that getting past the gameplay to reach the writing is your goal. Your writing should be the REWARD. If your writing is something the player has to slog through to get to the game play, there is too much writing.  

You have my UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Every game I've ever written has had a lot of words. Some of those games, my fans really loved the words. Some of them, not so much.

My goal for my next series is to use fewer words, but to make them as light and interesting and funny as I can. I want words to be the reward, the thing that pulls people through the story. I am dreading this, because, again, writing something good and short is way more work than writing something dull and long.

In the meantime, I am remastering my old Avernum 3, with its pokey little 200,000 words. This means giving those words an editing pass. A lot of my time is spent chopping out extraneous words and revamping what is left to make it smoother, easier to read, and, whenever possible, funnier. If the new version has more words than the old version, I've done something wrong.

For a long time, I sold games with a lot of words. Now there is a lot more competition in that space, and words are super-cheap. I need to try to sell good words. Even if I never make a nice, dank meme, in this crowded market, you need to get every little advantage you can.

###

Jeff Vogel sells his wordy old-school RPGs at Spiderweb Software. He is brutally forced to be terse at Twitter.

[rebeccahpedersen]

Learning A Transitioning Market Is Not Easy

TorontoRealtyBlog

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a seller, a buyer, or an agent – learning a transitioning market isn’t easy.

Now to be fair, a lot of the people who fail to learn do so out of ignorance, or refusal.  It’s not easy for a seller to accept that they would have sold their house for a higher price in February, and still pull the trigger in June.

But as the spring market looks to summer, I don’t know who looks more foolish: the stubborn seller, or the ignorant one.

Change is something a lot of people are inherently bad it.

Personally, I’ve never been good with change.

Big or small, I hate change, in every way imaginable.

I remember being 11-years-old when my father came home and told us that he had bought a new home, which was much bigger, and in a better area.  I cried uncontrollably for three hours, and was anxious every day for weeks.  When the “FOR SALE” sign went up on our lawn, I got a hammer out of the garage, knocked it off its post, and hit it around the side of the house.

We moved eventually, and the house was incredible, as was the area, and the street.  But in that moment – being told a massive change was coming, I was completely unwilling to accept it.

Big or small, I hate change.

I’m writing this from my dining room table, where I write most of my blogs.  I’ve sat in the same chair for six years, and my wife just moved the table against the wall so we can have more room for our 7-month-old daughter to play, and I’m losing my mind.  I feel lost on the other side of the table, in a different chair.

Anyways, that’s all besides the point.

Not all change happens immediately, overnight, or on the spot.

Some changes take time, and happen slowly, and that period is called a “transition.”

I’m not sure which change is tougher to accept: the one that happens right away, or the one that takes place slowly.

Perhaps with the former, you have more time to act in denial.

The Toronto real estate market has changed, and is changing as we speak.

Houses are still selling, prices are still up 15% on the year, and the market is still a seller’s market.

But we’re a long way from what transpired in January and February of this year.

As I’ve written on TRB over the past two months, and showcased in some of my Pick5 videos, single-family homes are no longer selling for 161% of the list price, nor are they getting 10-15 offers, each and every time the sign goes up on the lawn.

And remember when crummy CityPlace condos, listed at $379,900, were getting six offers?  That was an interesting time…

I’ve posted a few blogs on the “listing and re-listing,” as I call it, when houses come out at a low number, hold back offers, don’t sell, and are then subsequently re-listed higher days later.  But now I want to give you an example, just to show you exactly what’s going on in this transitionary market, and just how ignorant or careless some sellers are being.

But first, consider the following:

1) The price a house is worth. 2) The price a seller wants for the house. 3) The price the market will bear for the house.

Once upon a time, #1 and #3 were the same.

“A house is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it,” the infamous real estate adage goes.

Whether the market is hot or cold, we can argue that a house is truly only worth, or worth as much as, a buyer is willing to pay.

Today, that might not be relevant, as I’ll explain when we talk about houses that are actually under-listed, but don’t get any offers on “offer night.”

As for #2, that’s also an interesting intersection of today’s market, since, for a long time, the sellers had absolutely no idea of what price they wanted for their homes.

When the market was at the peak of insanity, I was having trouble getting sellers to believe me when I told them how much I thought we could get for their properties, or even on offer night, when I called and said, “Our highest offer is for $681,0000,” the seller, who thought his property was worth $500,000 three months earlier, would say, “This is a joke, right?”

So whereas in a hotter market, #1 and #3 were more than #2, it seems today, the opposite is true.

Many sellers want and/or need to sell, and will do so in current market conditions.  They’re not looking forward, not looking ahead, but rather working in the current market.

Then some sellers are stuck in yesteryear, refusing to acknowledge that prices are actually down from earlier in the year.

I’ve never seen this level of willful ignorance, nor have I seen this level of greed.  The entitlement bears mention as well, as many sellers feel that having owned a house in March, entitles them to March’s price, today.

I told you the story a couple of weeks ago about a house on which I bid in Leslieville, listed at $799,900, for which my clients offered $900,000.  That house was re-listed for $1,050,000.

But that’s nothing compared to what I saw last week.

Another house, which we’ll just say is in the city, was listed for $899,900.

I had clients looking in this area, who are merely starting their search, and I told them, “There’s a house that’s up for sale, taking offers tomorrow night, that will not sell, and will be re-listed higher.  I think we should go have a look, just as an exercise.”

Disect what I just said, and it seems odd.

The house is for sale, but I know it’s not going to sell on offer night, and is going to be re-listed higher?

Why?

Well, three reasons:

1) The sellers likely want far more than the current market will bear. 2) The listing agent is playing a game that nobody wants to play. 3) The buyer pool want to know what the house is actually worth.

And that’s another distinction we need to make here.

Part of the reason why all these houses are being listed and then re-listed, after they don’t sell on offer-night, is because the buyers know there’s a built-in “Plan B” to re-list.

It’s at that point, that the seller has to essentially take off the disguise, and tell the market what price they really want for the home.

So with respect to this house I was showing last week, I told my buyers, “This house is worth more than $899,900, no question.  It’s a semi-detached, 3-bed, 3-bath, with parking, fully renovated; it’s a million-dollar house for sure.”

My clients’ budget is somewhere in the $900’s.  As with most buyers, they probably want to land under $950,000, but they can go to $1M if need be.

I wanted to show them this house, not only to introduce them to the area, and show them a particular style of home I thought they might like, but also, as I said, as an exercise in what’s going on in today’s market.

It’s one thing to have money, and another thing to be an active buyer, but navigating this transitioning market is not something every buyer is ready for.

We went and took a look at the house, and it was a very nice renovation, but extremely poorly presented.

I know I’m going against some of my own advice here, when I tell buyers to “look past” certain things, but it’s tough to do when your first impression is the old sh!tter sitting on the front lawn:

A million-dollar-house, you say?

It sure didn’t present like one.

There were so many careless and lazy elements of this listing.

Little things – like leaving fluorescent light bulbs in the garden:

It’s just really careless.

But why amateur-flippers finish 98% of the job and then list in a hot market, is a topic for another day, and one we’ve covered many times.

Suffice it to say, there were urine stains on the marble tile in the bathroom, the sellers were too lazy to peel off all the stickers on the new Pella windows, and it was quite evident that the listing agent couldn’t be bothered to drive 45-minutes into the city to check up on his/her listing, as nothing had been updated, cleaned, or rearranged after a slew of agents and buyers had trekked through.

In any event, the intrinsic value of this house was at least $1,000,000.

And yet I showed this house to my clients, when it was listed at $899,900, at 7pm on the very night of offers, and by the time they showed up at 7pm, I had just spoken to somebody at the listing brokerage who told me there were zero registered offers.

I told my clients, “We’ll keep an eye on this one, and see what they re-list for,” the same thing I had told them the day before, in anticipation of this very result playing out.

I figured they would re-list around $1,049,000, or $1,079,000, but I held out hope that they really needed to sell, the house would be re-listed for $999,000, and my clients might have a shot within their budget.

The next day, I couldn’t find it in “My Favourites” on MLS.

I thought it had disappeared.

But evidently, I just never thought to scroll down – way down, down there: towards the properties priced around……………..wait for it……………$1,330,000.

Yes, $1,330,000.

The increase in price on this home was nearly 50%.

And what astonished me more than the new $1,330,000 list price was the fact that, at some point, the seller and/or the listing agent thought that somebody would pay 150% of the list price for this home.

Why not just list the house for $1?

And now, the property will sit, likely for weeks, possibly for months, as the sellers lament the cruel market that surrounds them.

In reality, they never should have under-listed at $899,900 in the first place, but rather should have listed for a price that reflects #2 on our list above: the price that they want for the home.

Because I believe that the new $1,330,000 list price reflects a built-in “negotiating cushion” that they, for some reason, felt they needed.

Sellers in today’s market need to realize that they can no longer expect to under-list their properties for a price that often seems to be selected at random, have a windfall of offers on their pre-selected date, and then sell for a price that was nowhere near their expectations – because they never had any expectations to begin with.

Many buyers are now waiting to see what the re-list prices are, before they consider making offers on houses.

Welcome to the Summer, 2017 market, folks.

We’re in a transition, and so many sellers just refuse to accept market conditions for what they are…

The post Learning A Transitioning Market Is Not Easy appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

TLDR.jpg (Also note: This gigantic lore-lump is just for choosing your character's sex.)

"Too long. Lose half." "Which half?" "The half that you don't need." - Their Finest

My whole career has been based on writing very story-heavy games, with lots of words. Our company, Spiderweb Software, is small. We can't afford fancy graphics, so we have to rely on words. Interesting, quality words.

We're currently remastering the series with our most loved story and our bestest words. We also finished a new series, which had a lot of words which I suspect weren't as good because it didn't sell as well. Now we're planning a whole new series, and we need to figure out how many and what sort of words to cram into that.

We have a lot of decisions to make, so I've been thinking a lot about words in games. I have made a number of observations.

For Reference

A decently sized novel contains about 100,000 words. The Bible contains about a million words.

My wordiest and most popular game, Avernum 3, which I am now remastering, had about 200,000 words. At its release, people talked about how very, very, many words it had. Yet, by current standards, it is very terse.

In comparison, one of the best-written RPGs in recent times, The Witcher 3, had about 450,000 words. For The Witcher 3, "best-written" means "One really good storyline and many, many other storylines that were basically OK." (To be fair, I think the Heart of Stone DLC was really well-written.)

The word bloat continues. While Divinity: Original Sin had a mere 350,000 words, Tyranny spent 600,000 words telling the story of how you became the word's most evil middle manager, on a bold quest to try to tell apart the game's 73 factions.

And this is positively tongue-tied next to Torment: Tides of Numenara's 1,200,000 words. I admit I am curious about what story is so gigantic and epic that it requires 3 times more words than The Lord of the Rings. I will never find out, as there is nothing that will tempt me to play a game with 1.2 Bibles worth of text.  

This is me playing your RPG lol.

Vogel's Laws of Video Game Storytelling

1. Players will forgive your game for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.

2. When people say a video game has a "good story," what they mean is that it has a story.

3. The story of almost all video games is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." This almost never leads to a good story.  

For reference, this is how to get me to read the text in your RPG.

Observations About Words In Video Games

1. For a while, there was a big demand for games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. That is, old-school icon-based RPGs with big stories, told in lots and lots of words. Early hits, like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity made a lot of money off this demand. Sales of later games in this style, like Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara suggest that this pent up demand has largely been satisfied.

2. It's really easy to make words. Really, really, really easy. Any writer with half a grain of skill can spew out 500,000 like it is nothing. And if that writer's fingers get tired, an intern with aspirations of authorhood will chip in 100,000 more. And when that intern passes out, you can let your Kickstarter backers add words to your game and they’ll pay you for the privilege.

3. No, really, think about that last point. People will pay you to be able to write for your game! Adding words to your game has negative cost! Think about this the next time someone tries to use a giant word count to sell you a game.

4. The secret of great writing is not adding words. It's cutting them. You can almost always improve your writing by slashing chunks out of it and refining the rest. However, as game development is done with limited budgets and limited time, this editing process almost never takes place.

5. When a writer gets famous, they stop being edited. This is why the fifth Harry Potter book is 900 pages in which only like two things happen. This is also why, when a game in 2017 is written by a Big Name and has a script with one bajillion words, most of those words are going to be pretty boring.

6. There are well-written games. Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3 are solid. I remember Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment were all right, but I played those 20 years ago, and there may be a lot of nostalgia in play there. (For me and almost everyone else.) Planescape was cool, but I definitely remember blasting past a lot of text just to get through it.

7. Sturgeon's Law is in play here: "90% of everything is crap." For every Planescape: Torment, where they had a cool setting and story idea and really put the time in to write good text and have it interface with the gameplay well, there have been nine other games where they just threw up a bunch of Tolkein-light Kill-that-Bad-Guy stuff and hoped it stuck. It didn't.

8. Having lots of lore in your game is OK. Some players really love lore. But then, a lot of players really don't. I think it's best if you try to keep your lore separated a bit from the significant game text, like Skyrim putting the stuff in books you could easily ignore. World of Warcraft quest windows did this perfectly. All of the lore was in one lump ("You mean dwarves like to dig mines? WOAH!"), and the actual text of the quest ("Kill 10 goblin toddlers.") was broken out of it so you could digest it quickly.

9. Humor is very hard to write well. It is also one of the most enjoyable things to read. If you can make your game genuinely funny, people will love it forever. (The actual gameplay of Psychonauts was only B-, but people LOVE that game because of how funny it is.)

10. The ultimate goal of writing in a game: Have it be good enough that getting past the gameplay to reach the writing is your goal. Your writing should be the REWARD. If your writing is something the player has to slog through to get to the game play, there is too much writing.  

You have my UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Every game I've ever written has had a lot of words. Some of those games, my fans really loved the words. Some of them, not so much.

My goal for my next series is to use fewer words, but to make them as light and interesting and funny as I can. I want words to be the reward, the thing that pulls people through the story. I am dreading this, because, again, writing something good and short is way more work than writing something dull and long.

In the meantime, I am remastering my old Avernum 3, with its pokey little 200,000 words. This means giving those words an editing pass. A lot of my time is spent chopping out extraneous words and revamping what is left to make it smoother, easier to read, and, whenever possible, funnier. If the new version has more words than the old version, I've done something wrong.

For a long time, I sold games with a lot of words. Now there is a lot more competition in that space, and words are super-cheap. I need to try to sell good words. Even if I never make a nice, dank meme, in this crowded market, you need to get every little advantage you can.

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Jeff Vogel sells his wordy old-school RPGs at Spiderweb Software. He is brutally forced to be terse at Twitter.