Frankly, we need to be less judgemental about people ingame.  I'm willing to accept people who may not be good at RP yet, but are WILLING TO LEARN.  However, we get the "guildification" effect (ESPECIALLY with OOC, mass-recruiting guilds (you know who you are) that basically starve RP guilds (many of which have very valid RP reasons to be slower/pickier about recruiting than the OOC mass-recruiters) of people while (in some cases at least) sending the newbies they recruit down the garden path wrt RP.  What also hurts is the lack of players.  0.5 killed us in this regard; mainly due to the jump in hardware requirements.  This makes spontaneous RP (I try to pick stuff up at times) MUCH harder to find...also, we have many characters who seem to have no time for conversation, which is a killer for spontaneous RP.  (They often run by /greet's or "Hello there"s without even as much as acknowledging the greeter's presence, ne pausing for a bit of small talk.)  Finally, why does nobody seem to want to hang out in the taverns these days?  Is everybody really too busy hunting/crafting/questing?

Where are people getting this whole "you can't use daggers against shields" business? I've done it before, I tended to use short swords and daggers, and if your smart/quick its quite easy to get a dagger around a shield with enough force to make your opponent drop something O.o (well what would be enough force if we were stupid enough to be using sharpened weapons). Although if you were outnumbered, you would be screwed, and it is generally a rather risky thing to attempt.

anyway, to be honest i think daggers should be one of the only offhand weapons to be honest, i've always found the idea of someone running around wielding duel long swords  rather...stupid, it'd be pretty unwieldy and the guy with one sword would most likely be able to get through your guard, I'm sure its perfectly possible, but with long weapons like swords (short sword being an exception I suppose) it seems somewhat pointless to me, a sword and a dagger, thats a good combination, use one for parry and when your opponent gets close shove the dagger into their neck ect. but 'eh... thats just what I reckon.

You can simply jam their shield-arm to the outside, which forces them to use their feet...if you have them pinned to a wall when you do that, you can get quick strikes in that way.

BTW: try imagining a "box" in front of the enemy's (or your) torso.  You want to keep your hands/arms inside that box, so that you can strike or parry.  Also, whoever has their arms inside the opponent's has the advantage, as they can basically control the fight that way.

The goofiest part of this is that daggers IG do Slash damage, not Pierce, which doesn't exactly make that much sense...although can't we all admit that the combat system needs a thorough rework?

Or:

• Swords do Slash (and in the case of claymores, Blunt) damage at the moment.  They should really do all three damage types in various proportions (either mostly slash for say a sabre or falchion, mostly pierce for say a rapier, or a fairly even mix of the two for say a longsword; heavier blades would get more blunt damage then lighter ones (but it'd still be minor compared to the blade's Slash or Pierce stats)
• Knives and Daggers always do Slash damage.  This is a holdover from when Pierce was not implemented.  Again, they should do a variable mixture of Slash and Pierce damage to account for the fact many of them can be used both for cutting and stabbing/thrusting (unless you are dealing with a weapon that is thrusting-only, which would do only Pierce damage)
• Axes do Slash damage as well.  They should be able to do Blunt damage too (I don't see how someone would NOT be in pain after being hit with the side of an axe).
• Mace & Hammer is fine in all aspects (these weapons do Blunt damage en masse, obviously) with one exception: quarterstaves should be under Polearm due to their length and the fact they are held at the center, not at the end
• Polearm isn't fleshed out yet (quarterstaves SHOULD be considered polearms if they aren't already), but when further developments are put together, staves should be all Blunt damage while spears and the like are mixtures of Slash, Pierce, and Blunt (simply turn the spear around or use the flat of its blade to get Blunt damage).
• Ranged right now covers bows.  These do Pierce damage exclusively.  Throwing weapons are a different can of worms all together: I guess they'd do Pierce as well, but you'd need some sort of modifier to account for the point's impact angle to the target (which very often is not 90deg, due to the fact knives and stars have spin on them when thrown; darts on the other hand do not need such a modifier, whether thrown or shot from a blowpipe)
• Melee, finally, can simply do Blunt damage (or can it? Should we take into account moves beyond the obvious kicks and punches, such as joint manipulations of various and sundry varieties?)

Also, if we do decide on a minimal speed penalty for heavier armors, couldn't we use a stamina penalty instead?

Roleplay is about playing roles that are coherent with a setting, a set of rules and the community that makes these up.

It's easy to learn and play out when everybody's having fun and respecting the simple rules it implies. There's no such thing as good or bad roleplayers. It's a binary situation: either you're a roleplayer and you allow everyone to enjoy the game, or you're an autistic idiot that's living a fairy tale.
Simple mistakes and misunderstandings are irrelevant, since the objective is creating the history that's the continuous outcome of the game.

Edit to say: I disagree LigH. I've seen people new to roleplay doing a better job than most roleplayers that have been around for ages. Because of one thing: they came here to have fun and that objective is still fresh on their heads.
Some people think they've mastered something and end up ruining everyone's experience by acting god, when they can be mistaken as often as the other.
Guilty as charged!

What do some of us do with our warped, twisted sense of "fun" then?

-> Bugtracker plz.

"These days we plan a lot more because it costs a lot more. So if I start out going, "oh we want a character that's a giant pterodactyl," then later I say, "no, let's make it a T-Rex." Then thousands of dollars have just gone out the window. You have to be careful when you change direction in this day and age. Doing more planning is the most significant difference in design methodology between being young, and now having a larger team and more experience."
-- Cliff Bleszinski

"Good writing skills. When not actually arguing and throwing feces at each other through our cage bars, a large portion of a game designer's job is design documentation or writing 5,000 e-mails. That means you need good technical writing skills and an ability to organize your thoughts. You need to be able to pass a document off to audio, QA, marketing, the programming staff, and an artist, and they should be able to find out whatever information they need just by looking at the document."
-- Chris Avellone

It seems all successfull game designers feel it is exceptionally important to be able to plan ahead and communicate with other developers. If the game designers fail at these tasks, the game is very likely to lose its investors or fail to attract players. Not everyone is able to create a document and make sure the development follows it as closely as possible. But that's what makes the difference. Some designers make their names, others don't.

Go read the Agile Manifesto Draklar.  Waterfall development techniques, as your quotes refer to, have been rendered practically obsolete in this fast-changing day and age.  The main problem is that PS is still organized as if it were a waterfall-based system...which makes little sense for a project of this scope with an all-volunteer staff.

back on topic please?