Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I've sat on public rooms on Penn games too and had the same experience. This isn't an Ares thing.

I have had someone walk in on me on grid, on a Penn game. It's just that every time it was the same one person. So there's one person (hi @Caggles) who actually does this. No, it's not an Ares thing, it's a game culture thing.

[Lotherio]

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Would could help Ares is removing these from that list, so synchronous players get a picture of what is actually synchronous activity?

Then you're relegating asynch RP to a second-class citizen, implying that those kinds of scenes don't "count" because they're not "active".

This is already how it feels on Ares games for synchronous players when they see a place that is heavy on private scenes, scenes that have been playing for weeks and such. It feels like traditional synchronous play is 2nd class citizen. I'm not opposed to Asynchronous, I'm glad its on the game itself versus having to like to go google docs.

[faraday]

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

This is already how it feels on Ares games for synchronous players when they see a place that is heavy on private scenes, scenes that have been playing for weeks and such. It feels like traditional synchronous play is 2nd class citizen.

There is a world of difference between a codebase that gives equal weight to both styles of RP and PLAYERS preferring one over the other...

versus folks suggesting that the codebase itself somehow relegate one style of RP to the back burner because it doesn't count as their definition of "active".

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@faraday Agreed. There are no doubt games that could do with a community effort to make things less closed-off and private. I think I mentioned above, I have quit games that had this problem -- that you just can't get into stuff, synchronous or asynchronous, because you're not part of the old boys' club. But that is indeed not a codebase issue.

[Lotherio]

@faraday This just further alienates me by saying I'm wrong in feeling put off by seeing lots of private scenes.

[faraday]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I have quit games that had this problem -- that you just can't get into stuff, synchronous or asynchronous, because you're not part of the old boys' club. But that is indeed not a codebase issue.

Indeed.

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@faraday This just further alienates me by saying I'm wrong in feeling put off by seeing lots of private scenes.

Private is not the same as asynchronous.

I could log into a TinyMUX game and get put off because there's never any RP to be had because everybody's off in their private apartments or RP rooms.

Nobody's being treated as second class there.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I could log into a TinyMUX game and get put off because there's never any RP to be had because everybody's off in their private apartments or RP rooms.

And this also puts me off. It's a problem on World of Darkness games, if you ask me.

[Lotherio]

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Private != asynchronous.
I could log into a TinyMUX game and get put off because there's never any RP to be had because everybody's off in their private apartments or RP rooms.
Nobody's being treated as second class there.

I know what asynchronous means, this is more insulting. My fault, my dyslexic brain put the two together, but lots of private scenes and/or lots of month old scenes still going with days between poses are in the same group, even if different definitions.

If I go to TinyMUX or Penn and see private scenes the same, I'll leave them too.

If I see age old scenes in the active scene list, it turns me off too. I don't care if they take that long, but if I want a pose a day or longer, I can find a forum to play on. This is just my pref.

[Sunny]

@Lotherio

I guess we're just too stupid for Ares, huh?

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Lotherio You're entitled 110% to your preference where your own scenes are concerned.

Age old scenes that seem to move glacially sometimes have another explanation, though. The group of players I spend most time with -- and myself for that matter -- are people who suffer disabling chronic illnesses. Playing at a pace of a pose per day, and sometimes less, is the only way some of these people can play.

Which still does not rule out that a lot of games could benefit from some kind of awareness that having things going on for new and unattached people to join is a good thing, and an effort should be made to cater to all play styles.

[krmbm]

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

If I see age old scenes in the active scene list, it turns me off too. I don't care if they take that long, but if I want a pose a day or longer, I can find a forum to play on. This is just my pref.

Admin can also set how long scenes are idle before they time-out. If someone is keeping them active with a pose within that time... nothing anyone can do, but - if scenes are sitting on games for days and days with no poses - it's because the game owner decided they wanted them there, not because Ares requires them to be there.

[faraday]

@Sunny @Lotherio We were talking about booting asynchronous scenes off the active list and suddenly there was a shift to complaining about private ones. Private scenes are already sorted differently than open ones, so I was trying to shift back to the original point (asynchronous). There's no insult intended here, so I'm sorry if it came across that way.

[Lotherio]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Age old scenes that seem to move glacially sometimes have another explanation, though.

Again, I'm not opposed to this at all. I still do forum play/play-by-post etc. I've google doc played with people in this discussoin that seem to think I'm arguing against asynchronous play and I'm not, I'm a fan of Ares, I've used it, I've gotten under the hood of it. Its just the UI maybe, I go to the portal to figure it out a new place, active scenes is right there for me to click which is good to show folks activity, I click it and see lots of private scenes or slow scenes. It puts me off. Other players have said the same. It is our pref. The OP can be something that may never be fixed and its a choice, its great.

[Sunny]

I think my issue with the "but you can turn it off in Ares..." line is...yes, yes, you can.

Ares does some things really, really, really, really, really well. First and foremost is the scene system, but it has a lot of really good features that are built into it and work really well with that scene system. Those things/features are what make Ares Ares -- they facilitate collaboration and a whole bunch of things down that road.

WHY would you use Ares and then turn all that off, instead of just using a tool that does the other thing natively?

[Lotherio]

@faraday I'm saying both put me off. Some of it is jumbled together. I'm not saying either is wrong. I've done both private scenes and extended asynchronous scenes plenty.

[faraday]

@Sunny said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

WHY would you use Ares and then turn all that off, instead of just using a tool that does the other thing natively?

Because it can be turned off? As you said, there are many features of Ares, of which "allowing scenes to stay open and counted as active for days on end" is merely one of them. Maybe you want to use Ares because you like the built-in wiki. Or the web based chargen. Or.. or.. or... There's no reason NOT to use it for your game just because you don't like seeing scenes stay open for long periods of time.

There's a reason it's a config option that you can tune to your (the game-runner's) preferences.

ETA: I mean I generally agree that Ares is not right for every game. I've steered several people over to Evennia or Rhost because those platforms fit their needs better. I'm just focusing on this particular config option.

[krmbm]

When @bear_necessities and I ran GH, we had scenes time-out after 24 hours... because we think it looked shitty to have a bunch of scenes hanging around that haven't been doing anything for days. Exactly as @Lotherio suggesting: it's not inviting, it doesn't make new people feel like they will get RP, it just makes the game look like everyone is holed up somewhere private. Since we had a kick-ass system that enabled us to tune the game to our liking, we did so.

In fact, we changed it a few times. Over the holidays, when it was slower, we allowed scenes to idle 48 hours. When plots ramped back up, we turned it back to 24 hours to keep the scenes list clutter-free. The flexibility was awesome like that.

Honestly? Now that there's a one-click "restart" button on scenes? I'd probably knock it down to 12 hours on any future games.

[Sunny]

@faraday

My post was not about the specific configuration option mentioned, but the entire scene system/collaboration focus of the platform. I think you may have missed the words "all that" in the quoted part.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Its just the UI maybe, I go to the portal to figure it out a new place, active scenes is right there for me to click which is good to show folks activity, I click it and see lots of private scenes or slow scenes. It puts me off. Other players have said the same. It is our pref. The OP can be something that may never be fixed and its a choice, its great.

Yeah, I get that. Preferences are preferences, and yours is as valid as anyone else's. The reason it sits poorly with me is probably that for me, it's not a choice. Either the game supports slow scenes or I can't play -- and by support I don't just mean the codebase allows stopping and resuming, I mean plot structure and story telling too. When everything happens in US peak time and if you're not there when it happens -- well, then that game is not for me. Regardless of what codebase it's on.

[Auspice]

@krmbm said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Honestly? Now that there's a one-click "restart" button on scenes? I'd probably knock it down to 12 hours on any future games.

I wonder if maybe having a way to flag a scene as variable might help. Because some of us (I know I and @L-B-Heuschkel do, for example) purposefully run asynchronous plot scenes for the non-standard-US time crowd. So setting a timer to 12 hours would be frustrating because I doubt the players would be on the ball enough to hit restart, so the ST would have to and hope that players would do their thing in time and... it'd slow things down even more, IMO.

BUT. If you could, when creating the scene, set a flag like 'This will be a slow scene' and it'd have a longer time-out window...... that'd be handy.