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    Jaunt

    @Jaunt

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    Best posts made by Jaunt

    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @HelloProject

      What you're suggesting is actually the purpose of another really cool project (that's on a 9-month hiatus due to 9-month reasons right now):

      http://www.futuremud.com/

      I know that the goal is to create an engine that is super easy to get moving and requires minimal amount of programming knowledge to use.

      Evennia, while it does require programming knowledge, does make things easier with its clean code, interface, support community, excellent documentation, and its use of Python. It's pretty easy to get Evennia running out of the box. As more contribs are open-sourced, eventually plug-and-play modules will hopefully make it pretty quick to get a fully functional game going. I know that we aim to do this for Evennia with our modules once we've got a basic, usable, adaptable engine and modules prepared.

      Hopefully in the next year, folks will have some great new options to start a game with less obstacles.

      So, those sorts of projects that you're wanting do exist. They're just still developing. They could be used to create a MUSH-like or RPI-like or any other sort of game, ultimately. The idea is flexibility and modularity, for both projects.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Chime said:

      whatever, who cares; like any technology you can do anything with it.

      Exactly this, and the rest of your post, 100%.

      @EmmahSue

      Thanks again. That's a lot of really helpful information, including making it clear to me how to know when you're speaking as a moderator and when you're not. We'll have a chat about how we might adjust our regular posting in a way that's less off-putting to this site, in particular.

      @Thenomain

      I knew what your stances were, but I've also misunderstood you several times in this thread (typically when you were saying something sarcastically or ironically, and I just couldn't tell). I was just double-checking to make sure this wasn't one of those times.

      @Arkandel said:

      And once again, you're missing the point -- you are not being bullied because you have a different 'philosophy' of text-based gaming. You're being asked to meet an expected standard of behavior customary to the locale, and responding by arguing, yet claiming to be bullied when people yell at you for it.

      Totally wasn't my intention. I strongly believe that a communication breakdown between some posters on this site and myself (and @Crayon and @Jeshin) has come from vague communication. MSB works differently than other forum communities that I frequent, and I obviously don't fully understand it. The request for clarification was purely so that I had the best information to take to the rest of the folks at OR when we chat about this.

      I've been entirely upfront here, and will continue to be. I have no ulterior motives here. I don't even know what they'd be.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      This is gonna be a long post. That's only because I really liked what a lot of folks had to say yesterday, and there are a lot of separate thoughts and ideas to respond to.

      TL;DR

      • RPIs are great for adventure roleplaying. Dungeons and Dragons style loves RPI.
        MUSHes are great for more social roleplaying. World of Darkness style loves MUSH.
        They're both awesome types of games for their own reasons.

      • Bad customer service sucks. Good customer service is personable, helpful, fair, but doesn't mean being a doormat or placing blame on the user. Good customer service is AWESOME.

      • I'm not a robot, but if I say something that makes you think I am, feel free to tell me. I'm definitely curious as to how I might give you that impression. Should I use more contractions? Should I go back to insulting peoples' intelligence? : p Maybe it's just because I'm verbose.

      Read on if you want more detail on the above summarizations. : p

      @surreality said:

      First, it's generally not an "I" creating a game. This may be assumed but it's worth noting it shouldn't necessarily be. I'm doing a fairly absurd amount of work putting one together now, but I am absolutely not doing it alone. (It's also worth noting that the people who are also contributing their time and energy to the project are folks I've met here for the most part, all of whom have contributed in equally important ways, from my perspective, just for the asking and some volunteered. Others provided advice and tutorials that helped get everything started.)

      This is actually pretty big, and it's something that shouldn't be discounted.

      That's pretty cool. I've always tended to create games, even MUSH, with a singular partner, not because I dislike working with a larger team, but because it's difficult to find folks who work at the same (crazed) pace that I do. I think that the idea of joint creation/responsibility is one of the cooler defining features of the MUSH community.

      The reason I say it's a fusion of both is that, after swapping in 'staff's' for I in the first statement, it tends to be the case. I wouldn't, for instance, put this much time and energy into creating a game I had no interest playing on at some point as well.

      This is very true in the other genres of MU*s, too. Not always true, but very often. While it's probably a bit less of a problem with MUSHes because of their social and (usually) non-automated combat systems, I do think it causes problems in other genres (like RPIs): when administrators are also players, I have seen the two following problems eventually destroy many games:

      1. They are more dedicated to playing than programming/designing/creating. This is probably less of an issue with MUSHes, since the content creation is more of a communal aspect of the game.

      2. Because they are so invested in their player characters, and they have the ability to do so, they cheat to get ahead. Cheating has always been a huge problem with MU*s, because there is an important trust-based relationship between player and admin. When that trust is destroyed, it very often ends up in an eventual player exodus, and it's really difficult to re-build.

      That's why staff on my games don't play PCs. We test PCs for gameplay purposes, and we observe others' play, and we GM --- but that's something that I always feel strongly about. Even the perception of cheating (even when it might not be true) can ruin the trust between players and administrators in other MU* sub-genres.

      Plus, I actually love GMing/scripting/world-build/administrating as much and even more than I do being a player. For me, the trick is finding folks to work with who feel the same way -- I want a staff that's happy, and it's completely valid that many would-be staff want to play the game that they create.

      Here's why: when it comes to world-building, to do it well, you have to love those basic building block ideas enough to give them enough meat on their bones to provide story hooks in abundance, even the ones that have no appeal to you at all.

      Absolutely! This is a big part of the RPI genre, too. Games that don't give players agency to build things, or go out and do things, or create plots of their own ... well, they tend to not do very well, comparatively. Supporting true player agency, whether automated, semi-automated, half-automated/half-manual, or entirely community built -- it's probably the most important design philosophy for MUSHes and RPIs.

      Each of these approaches has its own benefits and drawbacks. The MOO version's story, to me, was considerably more limited, because attempts to tell any story other than hunting zombies there was severely impeded by constant invasions of respawning zombies. On the MUX version, people can more readily experience other stories in that space -- but they can't do so without a story-runner handy to run the zombies if they want to hunt zombies. To have anything worth doing there, they need information about the zombies if someone is willing and able to run them for others, but they also need a pile of alternate story hooks worth exploring.

      Zombie Swamp sounds fun. I don't think that the MOO's version of the story needs to be more limited, though. It sounds like something that could be solved in design.

      For instance, I like to design "mob spawning" to take player agency into account. In Atonement (which basically had Space Zombies for players to deal with), I created destructible spawning nests. These nests would regulate the repopulation speed and total population size of the Space Zombies. The nests would also create other nests if they weren't dealt with, and the new nests would be a little closer to the PCs' "safe zone" with each incarnation. If PCs decided to stay on the defensive, things would gradually get scarier and scarier. If PCs decided to be proactive, and delve deep into the derelict ship on patrols to find nests and destroy them, the safe became safer and they could expand the "safe/civilized" area outward.

      But, I also built tools to stop the spawning, or to freeze combat so that we could roleplay scenes together. There was automated player agency to keep players engaged, and there was the ability for scenes of nothing but roleplay, and there was the ability for the later, followed by the former.

      If you use automated combat as a feature, and your game cares about roleplay, it's definitely worth it to add in tools to stop automated combat, stop spawning, so that you can engage your players with the same sort of in-depth roleplay that they'd get without those automated systems.

      In essence, I guess that I'm saying that the division between MUD and MUSH is best served when it's something of an amalgamation of the best of both styles. That's totally my preference and opinion, and don't expect others here to share it, necessarily. If you take the GM approach (where the GMs don't play, they just GM), then you can help support player-driven plots (while keeping a little more element of surprise in there for your players), you can help drive a branching, player-influenced meta-plot, and you can help create great scenes when you're around. But it's important to encourage folks to be proactive, and to give them agency, when you're not around. And so -- smartly-designed automated systems.

      I like adventure RPGs. MUSHes do socially-oriented settings really well, but I think automated systems for player agency are a big boon for adventure-oriented games.

      So, I totally agree with what you've said above! I think another important distinction between MUSH and RPI is that they tend to excel at two different types of roleplaying games: more socially-oriented RPGs vs more adventure-oriented RPGs. For instance, on Atonement, I do not think that players would have felt the anxiety of impending doom and danger quite so much if all encounters with zombies were player-run. The fact that permanent death was also included only furthered to increase an atmosphere of anxiety (it was a survival horror RPI, after all). The fact that the game itself was working against them at the same time that the story was developing created a tense environment that really fueled their roleplay.

      Both types of RPGs are cool. Both styles of games are important to the community. I won't really speak to other types of MUDs, as their goals are distinctly different from RPIs/MUSHes, and they're much more about hacking and slashing (or PVP). Success for them is found in an entirely different way.

      @surreality said:

      The primary benefits I can see in the MUX approach are that a broader range of stories can be told in the same grid space, even if it takes work to provide the hooks to allow for this. It also means the players can find creative solutions at times to problems the code hasn't taken into account, and an automated system may not provide for.

      True often, but I don't think it has to be true. RPIs also have dice-rolling mechanics for players to handle situations that automated code might not be able to take into account. And if GMs are good, they will be working to help players bring their plots to realization. I think that the main difference is that players get building tools on MUSHes, whereas on RPIs, players get in-character building crafts/scripts that GM Administrators support by helping those things come to realization, and player-developed plots require collaboration with a GM when something has to happen that goes beyond the player's toolset. It works very well when there is a great, active relationship between the staff and the player-base. It is obviously an annoying bottleneck for games that don't have an active staff.

      And that's why the big difference between the two genres goes back to philosophy, I think:

      MUSHes are created more communally. There is less of a divide between staff and players.

      RPIs put a lot more responsibility on their staff to create content, including content that will immerse players when they're not expecting it.

      It's an important distinction, but not a massive one.

      @HelloProject said:

      If you come off as -too- authoritative, it can make you difficult to approach.

      Yep. I agree. I usually interact with my players in a pretty casual way, unless something needs to be super-official. I don't tell my players how to play their characters (I hate it when administrators try to be roleplay police). I don't throw the ban-hammer around at people who annoy me. I'm a big believer in the player experience, and being available to my players. I let them friend me on Facebook. I give them my AIM SN. I respond personally to every PM or petition. I chat with them about non-game stuff on my forums.

      I think seeing your administrators as human beings that aren't so different than you, it helps players accept the times when administrators need to make decisions that not all players are going to like. It's that whole player/staff trust thing, again.

      There are lots of ways to do customer service wrong. I see them in our community all the time. Unsurprisingly to you guys, probably, I'm the sort of player that won't stand up for staff abuse or staff cheating on games. I've gone to dukes with many administrators over the past 25ish years. Because of that, I'm the sort of administrator that is concerned (perhaps too much) with not allowing myself or my staff to cheat or abuse players, and if I have a staff member who sucks at customer service, then they don't interact OOC with the players.

      As for other things you mentioned, there are things that we as a community could do re: promotion, that I don't really see done, like, almost ever. We promote within our own community, but I don't see people attempt to promote in other thriving communities of RP. I'd say that at this point, MUing is a small fraction of the role-players on the internet. There is a definite benefit to promoting outside of our community.

      Yeah. It's really up to the individual game's leadership to do the following:

      1. Create calls to action to encourage other admins and players to promote the game. Give them good leads on where to promote the game, and create some promotional material (fliers, banners, whatever it might be) that they can use.

      2. Promote the game yourself.

      Money definitely helps, but there are free options too.

      So, yes, I believe it's possible to grow the hobby. I see new players drip into it all the time, despite cries of the hobby being dead/dying.

      Definitely. I see new players frequently, too. I just know the laws of attrition will eventually tip things over to the point where the new players will be, less and less, not enough to make up for the loss of the old players. Because RP-focused games require such collaboration, the effect becomes somewhat exponential -- the smaller your game gets, the faster its user-base shrinks.

      The good news is that it works the other way, too! Specifically targeting young people is gonna be really important for us if we wanna keep this thing going well into the future. That might not concern everyone, but it's definitely a concern to me.

      @Miss-Demeanor said:

      Frankly, to me, the majority of yours, Jeshin's, and crayon's posts have read like radio instructions to me. ie. they're very dry and technical and my interest wanes pretty quickly after that.

      Parched dissertations. Ouch. I can accept that, though. This is the sort of conversation that I enjoy having. If it's boring to you, I'm not gonna hold it against you. But I'm also not gonna worry more about entertaining than I am about digging deep into ideas, because that's not what I'm personally here for. I save my fucked up sense of humor for chatrooms and real life, usually. : p

      As to MU*ing and 'customer service skills'... I am a CSR. Its what I do. Do I want to log out of my work and go... deal with more work? Not particularly.

      I get that. But somebody needs to do the work, right? Even if it's not you?

      It tends to be scripted, with a few specific responses geared towards a particular end (getting to the next customer, keeping people sticking with your company for the least amount of actual effort, etc.).

      You talk about customer service skills like there's something good about them. Here's your average set of customer service skills: Automatic deflection of fault onto the customer. Meaningless apologies to cover ineptitude. An inability to actually achieve the result sought because you lack the proper authority. Being shunted around to 3-5 different people for the same problem. Being forced into horrific wait times on any and everything because only one person knows how to actually fix half the problems.

      Yes! You're absolutely right. Customer service CAN be terrible and impersonal. It doesn't have to be, though. To me, the techniques that are important to me are as follows:

      Problem: User complains. Instead of getting defensive, or dismissive, or being a doormat for them to walk over, I try to approach things like this...

      1. Hear their complaint. Consider what you know about them. Try to understand what is actually motivating their complaint (do they have irrational issues with another player? Do they have a misconception about something that happened? Did their dog just die? Are they a constant troll? Why are they a constant troll?) Ask questions if you need to.

      2. Tell them that you understand their complaint in the simplest way possible. It doesn't need to sound cold. "Hey man, I hear what you're saying. Kestrel has been spreading rumors about your character that isn't true, and it's making it hard for you to find people to roleplay with. That's making the game less fun for you. Yeah?"

      3. Then tell them what you're going to do about it (or what they should do about it). This doesn't mean giving into them, because sometimes what you're going to do about it is "nothing". I might say about the above situation: "Cool. I understand how frustrating that is. Even if Kestrel does have it out for you, though, he's only acting in character. I can't punish him for that. I'll keep an eye on the situation to see if meta-gaming is happening, but here's what I want you to try for me: try to turn that IC conflict into something meaningful. Maybe the rumors about your character ARE true: maybe this is your chance to play an antagonist. Or, maybe your character decides to fight back with rumors of his own. Think about Game of Thrones; is there a way to approach this that would be fun, politically, and might win characters back over to your character's side? If all else fails, and you just can't find a new way forward for your character, it's okay to shelf him for a bit and play a different character. And when you bring this character back, bring him back with a bang."

      To me, that's good customer service for our sort of game. It's personable, it's helpful, and most of all: it shows that you care about your users and that you listen to them. At the end of the day, most people who complain just want to know that their concerns are truly, honestly being heard.

      @Sunny said:

      ETA: tl;dr Be a person, not a robot. We have our robot already and like him. We do not need two!

      I definitely don't understand how I'm acting like a robot. I'm a really offensive robot, if so. : p

      I'm verbose, but that's just me. Beyond my content push for October, I'm not marketing speaking you folks.

      If I say something robotic, lemme know. It'd help me to understand how what I'm saying is actually being perceived. I try to write logically when I argue, because that's what I've learned to be most effective ... but I'm a pot-smoking, liquor-loving, bar-tending, hippy actor/director/writer/game-maker and all around nerd. In reality, I'm probably a lot more chill than you perceive me to be.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Thenomain said:

      I don't know what games you've been on, but I've never heard stagnation being encouraged by saying "the old ways work just fine"**. I think that the Cult of the New is almost as dangerous as the Cult of the Old. The stereotypical young person sees the stereotypical old person as unwilling to change because new things are scary. The stereotypical old person sees the stereotypical young person as ignorant and with no regard to things that are that way for a reason.

      They're both right.

      Keeping things the way they are is correct because we understand how it works.

      Ignoring the way things are is correct because it's the only way to understand how new things work.

      I think anyone who clings to either one of these ideas is misguided, because we need both order and chaos, tradition and innovation. Whether or not people realize it, tradition is the foundation from which innovation grows.

      You've hit onto the important something about innovation here. New (re: inexperienced) people with new (re: untested) ideas are more likely to fail in their initial endeavors, while old (re: experienced) people maintaining the status quo (re: their personal preference) are more likely to reach an expected outcome with their project.

      But, the best case scenario in my mind is this:

      New (re: inexperienced) people with new (re: untested) ideas are taken under the wing of old (re: experienced) people maintaining the status quo (re: their personal preference). The new folks get experience that helps inform them of how to have ideas that are actual innovations that can succeed, and the old folks learn from the new folks what of their design philosophies are good, what are simply tradition for the sake of tradition (or ease), and how they might shift their perspectives to make their games more appealing to a younger, more inexperienced group of players.

      In short, it's the experienced folks who should drive for innovation, using their experience to guide them around the pitfalls of treading new ground. And if they can teach what they've learned about the hobby to newer members of our community, then those newer members will eventually push that innovation even further -- and, in the process of evolution, hopefully what we do finds a way to be more accessible, and we learn how to tell better collaborative stories.

      But what us vets have to learn from new players or would-be developers is important, too; they come to us with (relatively) few preconceived notions on what our games are and what they should be. They don't even know how they work, at first. They're the ones best poised, in many ways, to show us what sort of innovations might be necessary to retain more players. And, in a hobby where the goal is so rarely profit, players (and what players bring to our games with their roleplay and activity) are sort of our currency.

      ETA: Only somewhat related, it's the youth that generally has more free time to play, and more friends willing to spend their free time to try out something new. For most of us, as we get older, our circle of friends narrows and cements itself, and our responsibilities grow to the point where we just don't have the free-time to play as much as we used to.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      Simple and intuitive aren't the same things. While there are definitely things that could be designed more simply for MU*s (which could be either a good or a bad thing, depending), designing commands that are more intuitive is a definite positive.

      It's the whole learning curve thing. I don't think that you need to sacrifice functionality for ease of learning. I just think that, often-times with our engines, functionality could be a lot more intuitive than it currently is.

      For instance, while I don't find @dig to be a hard-to-use command (especially with macros/aliases), I can't say that it's very intuitive at all.

      I think that the prompt idea is interesting. If you could make a prompt system that was optional (for instance, only used if you typed "@dig" by itself), and was designed to actually help teach you how to use the @dig command (by showing you the new sum output for each step, highlighting the additions or some such), then I think you'd be onto something.

      The prompt would be slower, but very easy to understand and use, and it would teach you the faster, less hand-holding way to accomplish the same thing. To me, that's intuitive.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @surreality said:

      Essentially saying you realize you're slumming it to even deign to talk to someone and then wondering why you might come off condescending, though, well -- that's that self-awareness problem cropping up again, I'm afraid, no matter how noble, positive, or wholesome one's intentions may or may not be.

      I don't wonder why I might have come off as condescending at all. After reading the entirety of this thread for the first time, I am condescending. While there is some worthwhile meat here and there, a lot of the posts in this thread are thinly-veiled (or loud and proud) trolling. For what it's worth, I don't think that about anything I've read that you've posted here, @surreality.

      I'm not here to promote Optional Realities. S'not really my job.

      While I'm not really saying, "come at me bro", what I am saying is this: Jeshin and Crayon are going to continue to advertise here (for now, at least), because OR's not a MUD-only community (with about half of our members being MUSHes). I'm here and happy to receive and respond to any arguments, whether they be meaningful, thoughtful and helpful -- or whether they be poorly disguised attempts at trolling.

      @ThugHeaven said:

      It makes me wonder, why continue to post or update a thread where you're greeted with such opposition?

      Because we've seen good players find us from this site, and contribute to the discussions specific to our community in positive ways. Because even though our content might not be pertinent to many MUSHes, it is pertinent to some.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @surreality

      It'd be fairly unfeasible for me to reply to every question or point brought up over the past 21 pages of this thread individually, though I've read every post in the thread twice now. Since I've introduced myself and my perspective, but am just now joining the months-long conversation, I'm happy to start from scratch in addressing points made from here on out.

      If you have any specific questions in regards to Optional Realities, you'll get clear answers from me, though. I can promise you that.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Sunny said:

      Telling us how it is is not engaging, it's not dialogue, it's nothing but preaching to a bunch of atheists -- annoying as fuck. It's frustrating enough that it actually makes me angry with the now three of you. To say @Thenomain is just trolling...holy shit. If I could reach through the computer and slap you, I would.

      Y'all can keep advertising here. We can keep rolling our eyes. Folks around here (@Thenomain and @surreality in particular, but it's not limited to them) have shown FAR more respect for OR than the representatives have shown the community they are coming in to advertise in. If you don't like us and think we're a bunch of asshole trolls, GO AWAY.

      ETA: The thing that y'all seem to be missing is that this is a community that is of value to those of us that participate in it. It's not at all just a trolling/flame board, it's not about bitching, it's not about a lot of the things that the various forums have been about over the years. This is a good community with good people that contribute A LOT to one another, so the whole 'reaching out a hand to the savages' thing -- and yes, that's how a lot of this comes across you fucking pricks -- is beyond irritating.

      Edited to add again: This is the MSB crowd's living room. To my knowledge, nobody's gone over there to troll / harass, AND YET you guys keep coming over here to do that to this community. You lose all credibility in that action.

      I think there's some very ironic miscommunication going on here.

      Did we say that we are "preaching to a bunch of atheists?" Did we say that we "are reaching out a hand to savages?" No. Folks here, like you, did. You put words into our mouths that are completely out of context with our purpose. We don't think that, nor have we said that. It's called trolling. You're trolling right now. Stop that. It makes you look bad.

      Did Crayon or Jeshin act aggressively, or trollishly, here? No. You did. All they did was advertise and do their best to try to understand your points and respond to the best of their ability. As someone reading this thread for the first time, it's obvious to me that the breakdown in communication went both ways.

      Try ... very hard ... to understand this. OR's not a "MUD" community. This isn't a MUD vs MUSH issue. Half of our community is made up of MUSHes. Jeshin and Crayon, their home game is a MUSH. Let that sink in for you.

      I'm not attacking the value of this site to you folks. It's obviously valuable, because you have an active community here when many other communities are not active. There's some good discussion happening on this site. However, I don't think that "your best" has been afforded to this thread, universally. It's pretty clear that both parties have misconstrued each other's meanings or intentions, and that this site has been vastly more aggressive compared to OR's previous representation in this thread -- that is, until I joined the discussion, because I'm not going to be speaking through any sort of PR filter.

      As I stated before, if you feel unclear about certain questions that have been asked or problems that have been posed, post them for me. I'll give you a very, very clear answer. Nobody from OR's here to troll. We're here to provide information.

      If you want to roll your eyes at OR, go for it. If you want to engage in direct discussion, I'll be around. If that discussion is meaningful and friendly and useful, then my response will be too. If not, well, I'm not really a turn-the-other-cheek sort of guy.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Thenomain said:

      "It's up to you, not me, to be reasonable."

      https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

      If you have specific issues that you would like a specific response to in regards to OR, direct them to me and you will receive what you're looking for. If you don't care anymore, then don't care anymore.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Sunny -- read the entirety of your post, and then the below section a second time.

      @Sunny said:

      Clearly you're incapable of being civil.

      If that discussion is meaningful and friendly and useful, then my response will be too. If not, well, I'm not really a turn-the-other-cheek sort of guy.
      But we're supposed to be? Asshole. You might not be "trolling", but you're certainly being an abusive prat.

      Do you understand the irony of everything that you've posted? C'mon.

      Please, show me where Crayon and Jeshin insulted "the way you do things". Use the little quote button. I've read the entire thread twice and don't see it. If you actually support your forum vomit with something substantial (like a direct reference to whatever the fuck it is that you're talking about), then you'll have grown beyond blatant trolling and ad hominem.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt

    Latest posts made by Jaunt

    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      I'll forward your thoughts to Jeshin, as I'm not a server admin myself.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @ThugHeaven said:

      Did this die or something?

      Nope. It didn't die. There were just some serious server-side issues that took the site down for a few days. OR decided to use that as an excuse to take some time to re-engineer the website and forums. It should be back up this weekend.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Thenomain said:

      One of my more vocal/angry/forceful posts apparently (I am inferring) caused a regular poster to quit, so I am no longer going to share my opinion on the Optional Realities boards.

      This also means I'm not going to be reading the articles. It was one of the articles that I flipped my shit over, due to how poorly thought-out and limited it was. I imagine my response was the kind of response that causes people to not want to engage with.

      I suspected that my assessment of the articles was going to remain on the 50/50 (solid 'C') range for what I would expect in content; the quality of writing was about what I'd expect for a fan 'zine so eh who cares about that. The good articles were good. It's up to you, the reader, to decide if it's worth finding content that interests you.

      Best of luck, OR.

      Just to be clear over here, because we posted as much on OR, Leah didn't leave OR because of anything you said. I'm not going to discuss a private issue, more than to say it had to do with OR's moderating of off-topic threads, and her feelings towards the policy.

      Obviously, like I've said in the past, it's totally true that the quality and accessibility of the articles is going to vary author to author. For instance, I put a lot of thought into the three articles that I've written for OR, but they are largely specific to people interested in designing their own game and thus not all of them are universal. That's okay, in my opinion.

      OR is an ambitious hobbyist effort (while some of us are writers, none of us are game journalists -- except for @Brody), that primarily gets used for two reasons: conversation between developers that wouldn't often communicate otherwise, and player feedback and discussion about various games that help paint more specific pictures of those games for folks who might be considering playing them. A lot of players in our community weren't aware of how many games there are that are similar to their main game, and it's a great thing to be able to refer them to a new game when they need a break from their current play-space. It can only help with player retention in the community -- or, at least, that's the idea.

      I don't think you really ruffled any feathers over at OR, though. You were a little aggressive sometimes, but mostly reasonable. No flame wars started over what you posted. I wouldn't worry about you having a negative impact on OR at all: you didn't.

      My personal involvement with the running of OR and its articles is pretty much over at this point, if only because I needed more time for the development of my current projects. Running the October contest was sort of my last big involvement on the staff side of OR for a while. That said, I'll still write articles from time to time, and I still participate in the conversation there. It's a good community of people that are doing things. In an era of MU* stagnation, there's something to be said for that.

      @Kireek

      I have no idea who you are, or what you're talking about. I get that you're talking about me, and Project Redshift, but what don't I value in terms of transparency? I'm ... actually, like, one of the biggest proponent of transparency in ethics culture on Optional Realities, to the point where even my fellow Redshift team thinks that I'm too pro transparency.

      I'm curious as to how you think my/our (probably my, as the designer of the game systems for the engine) policies on ethics/transparency might negatively impact my design of the Evennia-based engine that we've built. If you've thoughtful concerns, things that I haven't considered, that might be helpful to me. If you've concerns built on misconception or something along those lines, I'd love to have the chance to set you at ease.

      Beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot on OR in October that I felt was particularly of interest to MSB in terms of articles ... but I do think some folks here might find our three winning short Interactive Fiction games interesting, from October's monthly creative contest:

      http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=339.0

      To note is that @Griatch walked away with the top prize in last month's contest.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Derp said:

      I mean, think of your most commonly used things. Pose, Say, Emit. The only things they do, literally, is change how the thing sent to the room you're in starts, and of course they can trigger certain side-effects with advanced foo (that no one ever uses). But even if you have a button for all three of those, seriously, how would it even be used? Do you hit the button and then type what you want to send, and hit enter? Do you type what you want to send and then hit the button to do it? Even the 'get' thing earlier, if you know what you're wanting to get, why do you need a button that does it?

      I wouldn't create a button for to-room roleplaying tools. I do think that they can be made more intuitive (for instance, by removing the need for the commands themselves and using a symbol like @ or the like to parse, so that the "command" is as close to just writing prose as possible).

      More important, I think, is to create rewarding, immersive tutorials to teach players how to use the commands they need to use most frequently. The rest of the gaming world has caught onto this, but our approach to tutorials has been cave-man at best.

      As far as 'get' goes, if you wanted to, you could create UI that would allow you to click on an object or character and see a dropdown menu of different ways that you could interact with that object. If there weren't any additional scripts on objects, picking them up COULD be as easy as clicking on them. And clicking on objects to take them is definitely something that all gamers understand.

      None of these ideas (besides tutorials) are great for every game, but if you can step back and not make any assumptions on how things should be for your game (in terms of commands and interface), then I think you'll find a lot of little things that could be done to help make them more accessible to new players.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @HelloProject said:

      There are probably more intuitive and time saving ways to do building period

      Most definitely. I think, ultimately, a fully realized web-based interface for building and scripting and other softcodey things would probably be the best, most intuitive approach for MU*s. Some engines have such things (some older versions of SMAUG, for instance), but most old OLC systems have become out-dated over the years ... as the genre's become more insular and isolated, there's been less motivation for creating and maintaining accessible OLC.

      It's still just as important as it was like 20 years ago to bring in new developers, though.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      Simple and intuitive aren't the same things. While there are definitely things that could be designed more simply for MU*s (which could be either a good or a bad thing, depending), designing commands that are more intuitive is a definite positive.

      It's the whole learning curve thing. I don't think that you need to sacrifice functionality for ease of learning. I just think that, often-times with our engines, functionality could be a lot more intuitive than it currently is.

      For instance, while I don't find @dig to be a hard-to-use command (especially with macros/aliases), I can't say that it's very intuitive at all.

      I think that the prompt idea is interesting. If you could make a prompt system that was optional (for instance, only used if you typed "@dig" by itself), and was designed to actually help teach you how to use the @dig command (by showing you the new sum output for each step, highlighting the additions or some such), then I think you'd be onto something.

      The prompt would be slower, but very easy to understand and use, and it would teach you the faster, less hand-holding way to accomplish the same thing. To me, that's intuitive.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @HelloProject

      What you're suggesting is actually the purpose of another really cool project (that's on a 9-month hiatus due to 9-month reasons right now):

      http://www.futuremud.com/

      I know that the goal is to create an engine that is super easy to get moving and requires minimal amount of programming knowledge to use.

      Evennia, while it does require programming knowledge, does make things easier with its clean code, interface, support community, excellent documentation, and its use of Python. It's pretty easy to get Evennia running out of the box. As more contribs are open-sourced, eventually plug-and-play modules will hopefully make it pretty quick to get a fully functional game going. I know that we aim to do this for Evennia with our modules once we've got a basic, usable, adaptable engine and modules prepared.

      Hopefully in the next year, folks will have some great new options to start a game with less obstacles.

      So, those sorts of projects that you're wanting do exist. They're just still developing. They could be used to create a MUSH-like or RPI-like or any other sort of game, ultimately. The idea is flexibility and modularity, for both projects.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Griatch said:

      @Jaunt I like the concept of the command-less emote with @ in it. Is this just a random example idea or something you are actually planning/have made for Redshift?
      .
      Griatch
      (who recently made a contrib emote system for Evennia but used the "emote" Command and didn't consider making it as a "no-match" system command. Cool idea!)

      Our idea for Redshift is to try to parse all possible output for to-the-room roleplaying tools using @ wherever possible, yeah. We have a stock RPI-ish system similar to your recent Evennia contrib in place currently, for the purposes of testing. Our goal is to have our fully realized system in place for our engine/game DEMO in the Spring. : )

      @HelloProject said:

      Once one gets used to the hobby itself, and perhaps gets a taste for wanting to do something more complex, if they do at all, then they can move onto learning an established thing like Penn. But again, as long as it costs money to make a MU*, I think that's going to remain off-putting.

      Well, I don't think that streamlined design needs to be any less complex in terms of functionality. In fact, REDSHIFT's really rather super complex in terms of what's possible. My goal with it is to make it easy to learn the basic commands (roleplaying tools, navigation, combat, etc) so that there is a more organic learning curve for new players. It's not about removing complex options, but rather making them easier to use.

      As far as hosting goes, it's actually really super cheap. @Jeshin pays about $200/year for REDSHIFT's server and three different websites with full forums and other features. The real cost for creating a MU* is in time -- specifically the developers'.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Derp said:

      Sometimes, coding for the LCD is not the most viable option, and expecting players to put some investment into learning the system and the command structure does, in fact, end up being your best option, even if it's not perfectly intuitive for a newbie or is somewhat complex.

      Absolutely. If you're doing WoD (or D&D, or some other established system) then there's a benefit to sticking with their system. Anyone who learns WoD will be able to understand the mechanics of your game.

      I personally prefer creating my own combat systems from scratch, because I feel like I can create things that were designed to work specifically for my game. When I've tried to adapt WoD or D&D for MU*s before, it can sometimes feel like I'm trying to shoehorn a square peg through a round hole.

      But I'm also not necessarily talking about that. I'll give a few examples of some things that I think could be more intuitive:

      Pose/Emote: While I think that "emote" is probably a more intuitive command for new players (since its used in chat rooms and other places, and everyone knows what emoji is currently) ... it still feels a little un-intuitive to me in the way that it's often executed. Is there any reason that, if I were to design a game from scratch, I couldn't do this:


      The winter wind howls as it tears through the camp, blowing snow about wildly in its bitter dance. Around the campfire, those gathered to listen in to the storyteller's yarn huddle closer to the flickering flames, struggling to stay warm even as the fire weathers the start of a frozen night. A young babe begins to cry, pressing its red nose to @mother's breast. "Come, little one", @ says with warmth in his old, learned voice. "Do not weep so. The Ice Spirits are hungry, but they cannot hurt you here. The magic of the Tale keeps them at bay. Let me tell you a story ..."

      As @ transitions into the start of his story, he pulls @hood up over his head and throws a handful of some strange powder into the fire. Suddenly, the waning flames leap into the air, coming to life in a burst of color: red, blue, purple, green. The fire dies down a moment later, but stands taller and stronger against the whipping winter wind than before.


      In the above cases, instead of creating different types of command qualifiers for emoting/saying/talking, I'm basically letting people write prose freely, and just letting them use @ for when they need to target themselves, an object, or another character. A modern engine will see @ and parse, knowing that we're now talking about an emote. It can even parse secondary words like tell/whisper/shout/say/etc, so that you don't need seven different commands about talking. One command that's smart enough to figure out what affects to apply to your character's speech can be enough.


      What about status commands? To look at your score sheet, or see what affects might be on your character? To look at your account information? To see how many players are online?

      What about using simple GUI menu interfaces that can plug in to MUSHclient or a webclient? It doesn't have to mean anything fancy, but even a simple health bar and menu buttons can go a long way towards making the interface a little easier to get for new players. Many new players claim to be turned off by ASCII prompts and ASCII representation of things. Why do we still rely on ASCII when webclients and MUSHclient can do GUI rather easily nowadays?

      What about tying the backend of your help files in-game to an actual help wiki with organized hyperlinks, using more very simple GUI?

      What about web-based OLC (some engines do it) to help with building and remove the need for developers to understand strange building tool/soft-code syntax?

      I like to think about something that I refer to as "player command upkeep". Can I look at my game's commands, watch players/testers, and say, "Hmm. They're having to use the 'scan' command every few seconds while they're out in the wilderness. Is that too much?" ... or, "Wow, they have to type seven commands just to empty out their backpack, organize the items on a shelf, and then fill their backpack up with water bottles. Why so much spam?"

      So, what can we streamline? Combat's its own, separate sort of thing. It's the most common interfaces and commands that I think are most worth looking at. Consistency in syntax style across all social commands. What's the simplest approach to emoting/posing that still allows for the same breadth of versatility?

      Why have players use '*' or '~' or '%' to target other objects/characters in emotes/etc, when they're used to using '@' nowadays in social media?

      I'm pretty much throwing a ton of random thoughts out there, but they're just a sampling of the sorts of things that I think about a lot. I've played and designed MU*s for so long (as have many of you) that it's really easy to take for granted that something should work a certain way just because it's always worked that way before.

      If you're starting from scratch, or near scratch, I've definitely found it worth it to keep your end goal/aesthetics in mind, but be open to considering each command and whether or not it could be streamlined and made more intuitive for new players.

      That doesn't mean designing for the Lowest Common Denominator (I don't think I'd call new players that anyways, they're just inexperienced; each one of them could be a gold mine of potential). It just means challenging myself to spend some time really thinking about how the interface could be better, easier to learn, more intuitive, and all without sacrificing versatility and function.

      Ultimately, I'd rather make vets learn new syntaxes if it means new players will be able to catch onto those syntaxes easily. Vets have played enough different types of MU*s that adapting to new syntaxes is much, much easier for them than it is for new players.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt
    • RE: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @HelloProject said:

      This reminds me of how YouTube and Facebook are horrifyingly bloated sites now, rather than focusing on being simple and functional. They're complicated and more difficult to understand than ever.

      Yeah, I definitely think that innovation needs to be geared towards making things easier to design for newcomers, easier to learn to play for newcomers, more aesthetically sleek and appealing (to attract more newcomers), and any feature enhancements need to be more intuitive to use than legacy commands. It's relatively easy for MU* veterans to learn new syntax (especially if they're intuitive). Legacy engines rely on some pretty non-intuitive mechanics and commands to manipulate things, and that's definitely a hurdle for new players who aren't used to text interfaces.

      Basically, innovation needs to not be bloating. It needs to be streamlining, first and foremost. That's a big reason that I've enjoyed working with Evennia for REDSHIFT, even though I was far more familiar with the OpenRPI engine that I helped to build. OpenRPI might be familiar (for RPI players) and have superior features already built into it, but all of its progress has been built on top of derivations of derivations dating all the way back to DIKU.

      Working from the ground up is more work, but has a lot of advantages. It's pretty easy to take old ideas and implement them more intuitively, while tying in more standard features with newer features in ways that actually make sense. Sure, I can't create a new game with Evennia in two months (not yet, at least, until more development plug-ins stack up) ... but I can create a game that is better, more stable, easier to learn, and doesn't have random chunks of legacy engines that are just code trash now.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      J
      Jaunt