Midnight MUSH

Wizz

Derail away, I don't talk to anyone about this stuff, haha.

Sunny

We use Spiceworks as our ticketing system where I work, it seems pretty functional. I think we are relatively tiny compared to most of all y'all though.

Arkandel

@wizz In that case (... sigh, unintended pun) I hate some parts of SalesForce so much since we're using it for reasons unknown, and I work with it on a daily basis.

The internal tabs intefrace. What the hell, that's borderline abusive to the users, who designed that UI?
If I add long lines - such as when I paste a freakin' log, which is often - the output doesn't wrap, but even if it's in a single comment I need to scroll horizontally forever more.
The fact I need to add myself as a team member to be notified if someone alters the case else I'll need to open it manually to find out.
The search function. Sometimes I'd take nodebb's over it, and that's saying something.

Argh.

Auspice

When I got my current position at work (hey guys, guess what, more 'my company sucks!'), they advertised it as 'Salesforce management'. And our first few days were 'here's a crash course in how to administrate Salesforce.'

Just like tons and tons of Salesforce Trailheads and such. Like oh my god I learned so much about Salesforce administration.

I honestly do very little in Salesforce other than manage user accounts and use the case system for tickets users send in. Everything else about my job is being a remote IT department.

So despite that initial day, the rare time someone calls in and goes... 'Hey, can you build out a report for 'X' for me?' I sit there for about 30 seconds and go '............uhhhh. Yeah. Let me.... see if I can, else I gotta send it off to <our actual SF admin who is a goddess>.'

But yeah, the internal tab interface is a hot mess, @Arkandel. Especially since it likes to sometimes get stuck on a tab. Doesn't matter if you go back to another tab, for the next month straight it'll decide to send you to that one every time you login.

Arkandel

@auspice A little hack I'm using to get out of that terrible interface is to use an address like this instead:

https://blahblah.salesforce.com/500

It escapes some of the horror and replaces it with a mild headache instead.

Wizz

@sunny said in Midnight MUSH:

We use Spiceworks as our ticketing system where I work, it seems pretty functional. I think we are relatively tiny compared to most of all y'all though.

We went from 30 people almost 4 years ago toooooo pushing 300-350ish?
And our dev cycle was a fly-by-night dumpster fire until last year. Our president really, REALLY wanted to have proprietary software and birthed this unholy Frankenstein abomination from the scraps of like five other projects. Agile methodology is like, super new to us, so Jira's our first and only tracker...sounds like we missed a lot of frustration along the way though, which is great.

Auspice

@wizz said in Midnight MUSH:

Our president really, REALLY wanted to have proprietary software and birthed this unholy Frankenstein abomination from the scraps of like five other projects.

shudder

Wizz

@auspice

Yyyyyyyyyyyyeah that guy was a real treat. We got bought this year and one of the first really big things they've done is replace him, hahaha!

TNP

@wizz said in Midnight MUSH:

Thought it was more approps to reply to this here, haha:

@cobaltasaurus said in Reno - the New Reno (Portland?):

@wizz said in Reno - the New Reno (Portland?):

@pyrephox said in Reno - the New Reno (Portland?):

I don't like it as much when people say, "Okay, here's a real city as our setting. It's...pretty much the real city, here's some cool set pieces or places, Google the rest." Make the city your own, give it a compelling narrative hook that makes me want to make a character to play in THAT place, at THAT time.

I already feel a tangent coming oh god but this is what I like about FATE. Creating the city is explicit and upfront, rather than WoD's approach of tucking it into an index or doing an obscure splat book here and there.

My Angel game used FAE and I couldn’t get people to even let me walk them through chargen.

I completely sympathize with this and I think it's a legit struggle for FATE places, the system does look pretty arcane at first blush. I hope to overcome this with roughly a bajilliothousand example templates, big ol' honkin' lists of powers and stunts, and enthusiasm for the setting.

It's not because the system seems complicated or otherwise don't understand it. It's because people hate it. Pure and simple.

Wizz

@tnp said in Midnight MUSH:

To me, it's not because the system seems complicated or otherwise don't understand it. It's because ~~people~~ I hate it. Pure and simple. Also I'm a poo-poo head.

FTFY.

But if you want to try again in a constructive way, you're more than welcome.

ETA: Like, really. If you don't like something about the system, there's a way to relay that without shitting all over the entire system, and I'd love to hear it. I really value the feedback and want to make this as painless for people as possible. If you're legitimately just stopping by to say "I hate this," thanks? I really don't know why we keep having to explain this subforum but, happy trails.

faraday

@auspice said in Midnight MUSH:

I am trying to think of a way to summarize what it is, but it's sort of like a... to-do list / issue tracker that ties directly into GitHub. Very handy for development processes if you're working on a project that has a Git repo.

Ah okay thanks. I'd never heard of that one before. I'm not immediately seeing how it's appreciably different from GitHub projects, but hey - if it works, great. That family of tools (GH projects, trello, smartsheet, monday, etc.) all do basically the same thing; it's just a matter of which bells and which whistles you prefer.

Auspice

@faraday said in Midnight MUSH:

@auspice said in Midnight MUSH:

I am trying to think of a way to summarize what it is, but it's sort of like a... to-do list / issue tracker that ties directly into GitHub. Very handy for development processes if you're working on a project that has a Git repo.

Ah okay thanks. I'd never heard of that one before. I'm not immediately seeing how it's appreciably different from GitHub projects, but hey - if it works, great. That family of tools (GH projects, trello, smartsheet, monday, etc.) all do basically the same thing; it's just a matter of which bells and which whistles you prefer.

I've never sen GH Projects! Maybe Waffle.io was around before GH projects launched? Not sure.

Trello works for team/project management in general, whereas Waffle.io is more focused on GH. I could use Trello for ANYthing (and honestly, if I run a MU with a staff-team, I will probably implement Trello for project/plot/etc tracking), but Waffle is a more focused tool... and so on. But you're right, it just depends on what all you want. For a pure dev project with Git, Waffle's gonna do you right. Trello is more "people" focused, I think. Personally.

I haven't messed with smartsheet or monday.

faraday

@auspice Trello has a lot of Git integrations as well. We use it at work. But yeah - they each have different slants. Just comes down to what you need it to do.

TNP

@wizz said in Midnight MUSH:

@tnp said in Midnight MUSH:

To me, it's not because the system seems complicated or otherwise don't understand it. It's because ~~people~~ I hate it. Pure and simple. Also I'm a poo-poo head.

FTFY.

But if you want to try again in a constructive way, you're more than welcome.

That was merely a statement of fact. You implied the system was arcane which is why the angel game didn't make it. I'm correcting you; it's not arcane, people just hate it.

There's been lots of threads about FATE and FAE, lots of games that tried using it. I can count the number of games that lasted on one hand if I lost four fingers: Dark Spires and that was a Dresden game using the Dresden RPG. If I recall right, that uses FATE.

A game that uses FATE seems to start off with two strikes against it so you should know that in advance. I hope it makes it, it sounds interesting. Good luck with it.

Wizz

@tnp Thanks!

Wizz

I do want to say, I actually do appreciate the warning. Making something like this is an investment, by all accounts it can be all risk and no reward and expectations should be appropriate, so I'll lay mine out:

I don't really care if this is "successful," by our usual metrics. I don't even really care if I open the doors and tumbleweeds blow in. I'm having fun and learning a lot building it, I hope I can entice people to come play when it's finished but that's not really my main reason for doing it. I've always wanted to do this and talked about it a lot, so I am.

Ziggurat

@wizz A seriously great way to be about it, my dude.

There's a tendency to throw around terms like 'success' or 'thriving' or the like when it comes to discussing MUs, and there is a ton of conflation with number of active logins, for example. I think to 'succeed', all you need is for your players and staff to be having a good time - however many people that actually refers to, is irrelevant. If you only end up with a couple dozen active players, but they are all telling cool stories and enjoying themselves, you're doing better than most any MU I've been on, by my reckoning.

Apos

Ten people having a blast is in my opinion more successful than two hundred people that are utterly miserable.

Arkandel

@ziggurat said in Midnight MUSH:

There's a tendency to throw around terms like 'success' or 'thriving' or the like when it comes to discussing MUs

The most common metric of success (at least in conversations like this) is the absence of failure. Are you logging on and there are multiple people online who don't seem to be idlying? Have you never seen threads about their staff screwing up too much? If you created a character did CGen seem to churn along at a reasonable pace? Well, then it's successful!

But in terms of individuals it's a crapshoot. Hell, even 'are people having fun' is just an empty phrase as usually it means 'people I personally know and asked'. In many cases it can be completely arbirtrary criteria that determine it; 'that superhero MUSH is terrible because the Flash is Wally West and not Barry Allen'.

To me longevity counts. I don't care too much for flashes in the pan kind of games; run it for a year+ without losing your players, then you're doing something right. I'd maintain that even for games I actually don't care for, or whose staff I believe to be unethical, because it's difficult to argue with the results.

Wizz

@apos said in Midnight MUSH:

Ten people having a blast is in my opinion more successful than two hundred people that are utterly miserable.

@arkandel said in Midnight MUSH:

To me longevity counts. I don't care too much for flashes in the pan kind of games; run it for a year+ without losing your players, then you're doing something right.

Actually, to be honest my best memories of this hobby involve games that each only lasted roughly a summer and consisted of about ten or fifteen people total. Like, I'm not going to complain if more people like the game and it lasts longer than I personally think it would, but I really don't care about trying to quantify and capture things like a "right" amount of time to run or the "right" number of people to have.

Like, if this never leaves the ground or crashes and burns after takeoff I'm not going to come back here and write a self-absorbed eulogy about it, haha. I've just got a strong urge to make it because it's a place I'd like.