Highlights of Ares?
-
I've been exploring the code and features of Ares and have come across some features that I think are really cool, that had me going 'Oh, that's useful! I wish I'd had that in X situations!' Stuff like separate windows for PMs and the web-based platform as a whole, and how everything is integrated really cohesively.
And I'm wondering if anyone else has any epiphany moments with aspects of Ares that they love, that they'd care to share; favourite features, obscure helpful features, etc.
-
@Hella Just being able to leave a scene and come back to it.
It's a double-edged sword though...because a lot of times players are like "oh hey it's cool if this scene takes three months, right?" whether you set it as "async" or not, thus slowing down the whole game and sucking the energy right out of it. It's like the culture of Ares has shifted from MUSH to forum-based RP...which is awful, because forum-based RP is universally too friggin' slow to get anywhere.
It's not like there on every Ares game, but the phenomenon has killed a few of them.
He/Him
-
@Devrex said in Highlights of Ares?:
@Hella Just being able to leave a scene and come back to it.
It's a double-edged sword though...because a lot of times players are like "oh hey it's cool if this scene takes three months, right?" whether you set it as "async" or not, thus slowing down the whole game and sucking the energy right out of it. It's like the culture of Ares has shifted from MUSH to forum-based RP...which is awful, because forum-based RP is universally too friggin' slow to get anywhere.
It's not like there on every Ares game, but the phenomenon has killed a few of them.
Being able to come back to a scene after taking a break and having everything right there.
Being able to be in more than one scene at once. This is the absolute game-changer for me. I have very limited spoons and time to RP nowadays, but being able to dedicate one day to just doing ALL the things I would need to get done? Fan-effing-tastic. This is the #1 top appeal of Ares to me. If this were available in other formats, I'd be all over it.
The aesthetic appeal. Ares just -- well. With proper CSS formatting, it just looks damn nice. For the traditionalists you still have the old command-line system but that web portal is just kind of a game changer for me being able to properly visualize everyone in the scene.
-
@Devrex said in Highlights of Ares?:
It's like the culture of Ares has shifted from MUSH to forum-based RP... It's not like there on every Ares game,
The fact that it's not like that on every Ares game kinda proves that it's not an Ares culture thing.
Ares supports multiple modes of RP. How you choose to use that comes down to expectations set by the game runner and communication between the players.
It's really no different in principle than the divide that used to happen on old-school MUSHes between people expecting 5 minutes between poses and people who were OK with "slow work" style RP with ages between poses, that may or may not actually finish before everyone goes home for the day. All it takes is some OOC chatter to make sure everyone's on the same page.
-
@faraday Yeah I'm not dissing Ares, I'm frustrated that forum-culture seems to seep into a lot of Ares games. I'm fine if a scene takes 3 days to a week to finish. I'm fine if poses take hours. I start losing all my enthusiasm if it takes more than a month to do one scene.
He/Him
-
Yeah, that's been kind of aproblem for me too. I've found that I need to set strict pose-time expectations for async scenes, otherwise people just tend to get to them when they get to them. Async is fine, but I think a pose time of 2-6 hours per pose is reasonable.
But that's another benefit of Ares. All the communications are easy to pull back up and go 'look, we definitely agreed on this thing here and that has not been happening so I think that we should work on wrapping this up asap'.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
-
@Derp said in Highlights of Ares?:
But that's another benefit of Ares. All the communications are easy to pull back up and go 'look, we definitely agreed on this thing here and that has not been happening so I think that we should work on wrapping this up asap'.
I really REALLY love that, too. I also love that logs are share-able. I think it's amazing to be able to read the stories being told outside of your own, if people are comfortable sharing them.
-
@Devrex said in Highlights of Ares?:
I start losing all my enthusiasm if it takes more than a month to do one scene.
Oh, me too. That would drive me insane.
All I mean is that what you're describing is a facet of Asynchronous RP in general, not Ares in particular.
MUs have a fairly solid baseline of community expectations for synchronous RP (more or less). People deviate from those expectations all the flipping time (slow work RP, backscenes, to-be-continued scenes, etc.) but they communicate when it happens.
The MU community doesn't have that shared set of baseline expectations for async RP. Not because it never happened (heck, I was doing async MUSH scenes via email circa 1995; LiveJournal; Google Docs; RP/TP Rooms; etc), but because it happened 1-on-1. Maybe we'll calibrate that baseline eventually, but in the mean time all it takes is communication.
-
My position:
You don’t know how much Ares does until you’re not using it any more.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
-
@Ganymede said in Highlights of Ares?:
My position:
You don’t know how much Ares does until you’re not using it any more.
-
@Ganymede said in Highlights of Ares?:
You don’t know how much Ares does until you’re not using it any more.
To OP's original question though - the async RP and web portal get the most attention for Ares in a "love it or hate it" kind of way. Obviously I'm biased, but I think that perspective tends to gloss over a lot of what's baked in from a MU client side too.
The automatic scene logs, dispensing with command prefixes, the integrated help/+help system, player handles and friend features, a comsys that supports both MUX and Penn commands, accessibility features for screen readers, unicode support, the editing commands that interface with "/grab"... there's kind of a lot.
Plus a fully out-of-the-box system that you can run with no code or coding experience.
-
That laundry list of "other" features are the features that I enjoy. Advanced age means that I forget commands and who's playing who on a regular basis. Knowing that my scenes are auto-logged, that I have different commands to do the same thing, and that I can figure out who I like to play with easily really helps the old farts like me.
-
I love that Ares has the ability to do asynch RP. (I mean, whether I like the "takes freaking forever and a month" scenes or not, some people love that so the fact that the capability is there makes me happy.)
But I also very much like the way XP is handled, it keeps people from advancing too fast and you can't rack up 100 XP and then spend it all at once.
I also like the ease of making a cha...ok, if I start talking about everything I like on Ares, we're gonna be here all day.
I'm not on any Ares games right now and while I have now discovered the joys of BeipMu, I am missing the Ares interface like whoa.
-
I think one of the biggest mental benefits of Ares is being able to do multiple scenes at once, and async, because then I never feel like I am holding someone up. And people can feel freer to RP when they know they can set it and come back.
It seems like the MUSHing community has, by and large, stayed a similar community, and whereas a lot of us started our MU* career when were single without responsibilities, as we get older we start finding that we don't have six hours to spend roaming a grid and finding great pickup RP.
I always felt bad RPing with someone if I could not give them my full attention because I was working and prone to boss calls, or trying to accomplish something. Because I was keeping them from RPing with someone else.
With Ares, they can RP with that someone else and respond to me. And the same goes vice versa.
I think the other thing that is great about being able to easily do async is that there are amazing RPers that live half a world away that I would not be able to consistently interact with absent that.
Finally, I think the sheer versatility of the portal allows for you to do some really interesting things. Like have a game where you have a core character, but different versions of that character exist. You can use the same stats (or not stats if you aren't a stats game) and then just expand out from there with your variations.
Also, since it hasn't been mentioned yet, if you are a game with alts, being able to have ONE login in ONE place and connect all of your alts (if you want to, optionally) for the purposes of pages, channels, and RPing? Huge plus if you want to keep track of things.
Honestly, it's going to be a struggle to convince me to go to any non-Ares game at this point because I have simply gotten too used to the conveniences.
