Optional Realities & Project Redshift
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@Coin Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey! I resemble that remark!
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@HelloProject said:
Presenting yourself as approachable, but keeping the customer service tools in the back of your mind for when they're actually necessary, is really a good balance.
I agree with this 100%!
@Miss-Demeanor said:
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.
Yeah, that sounds awful. It's totally not what I'm talking about, though. I'll go more in depth on what I meant in my next post.
@surreality and others:
Some really interesting stuff. Just wanted to throw out that I'll be unavailable the rest of today, but I'm looking forward to talking more about this stuff when I've some free time tomorrow.
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Yes, that does answer my interactive fiction question. Thank you. I didn't really need to be sold on it, just made aware of what it was. I always just used 'text based games' for things like Zork or LotRD or Tradewars.
I'm gonna echo what others have told you, as well. Go participate in the other discussions, and this thread will go SO much better.
@surreality said (but it's still @Jaunt):
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.)
A thousand times this. The game I'm building right now, the ones I've done over the years that never opened, and then Ashes...none of these were ever something that I could say 'I built that' even though I was always at the helm. It's definitely 'we'. I have to bounce ideas off of people and there's so much content to generate and policies to kick around and...so on. I cannot imagine that a game I put together all by myself would a- ever open, or b- be any good. Building a game, in my world, is as collaborative as playing in it. Actually, if you look at: http://musoapbox.net/topic/367/dust-to-dust-formerly-the-nwod-grenade-thread, you get just a taste of it. There are very few people on MSB that I can say haven't helped me in some way or another (even if it's just been opinions and such over the years).
(this is where the tangent starts I think, god)
Granted, some of that help was 'oh god if I do this for you will you SHUT UP and stop asking questions?' or 'are you fucking stupid what the hell this is a horrible idea', but it was still help. People have been taking code away from me for like 15 years now. It's probably a hint that I need to just stop. Someday I will do a thing and NOT make any of my coder friends want to cry. Someday.
That's really the thing though. What's key there is 'it was still help'. My skin is the thinnest. I think @Ganymede or @HelloRaptor both are some of the best to attest to that. I'm easily hurt, easily trolled, and oh boy my temper. Posting / participating here (and the other places in the past) for me was always a massive challenge (and painful) until I realized that the way I came across generally was a lot of the problem.
I came to the community as a representative not of me, but of my professional presence in the community. I was here as a game lead, or a sphere wizard, or as someone who knew that I'd be running a game again, a dino, someone who had to be Above Shit. Whatever. That's not what this place is for. When I stepped back and realized that I'd be better served in my professional presence by not presenting it here, I started working at taking the filters off. So now I'm just myself, I get picked on a LOT less (I cannot tell you how many times I have been in the hot-seat man, and I had people ACTIVELY MAD at me for years, rather than just annoyed by me on the boards), and generally the opinion of me has gone way up.
You just have to cut the shit and approach us as a person and not a representative of something. That, right there, is what I think is the foundation of the communication gap rather than the marketing persona. The marketing stuff is a symptom, I think the cause is personal vs professional.
ETA: tl;dr Be a person, not a robot. We have our robot already and like him. We do not need two!
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(Not a robot.)
@HelloProject
I have been a Headstaffer, and I've had mixed reactions to how approachable I was, but I was always available, almost always on the Pub channel making wise, and in the OOC lounge when I could deal with it, which considering the game this was wasn't very often. I certainly wasn't in the know and relied on my cohorts to fill me in on player issues, to which my response was mostly concerning lighting people on fire.
To concede to your point, being known is absolutely one key to being trusted. On Eldritch, I am in the OOC Lounge and in all of the channels. I don't tell people about my characters because I don't have any. I think I'm plenty social, but got quiet for a few weeks, and everyone being more social lately has helped the game's community.
The second key is being trustworthy, but that's a different discussion for another time.
I would like to immortalize @surreality's post for future generations about what the fundamental difference is between a Mud and a Mush.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
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@Thenomain said:
(Not a robot.)
I named no names! But you knew, anyway. You knew. I think that's proof enough.
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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
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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@Jaunt said:
- 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.
The compromise that we decided on in our Requiem2.0 MUSH was that we would allow Staff to play PC's but those PC's would never be able to 'get ahead' by making it against the rules of the game for Staff PC's to hold any position of influence beyond place-holder. I think this worked reasonably well though in practise the most active staff barely played their PC's due to being busy staffing, still the option to play was nice.
There does exist one notable advantage to having staff members who actively play the game and that is that they experience first hand how the game feels from the player perspective. As Staff it's easy to lose touch with what the actual game is like.
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I agree in regards to player experience. We use a toolset that lets us snoop players to see their real-time input/output from their perspective. We use this to keep up on what folks are doing, but also to view gameplay and experience through their eyes. Additionally, a lot of us use tester ports to test gameplay pretty extensively before implementation. That helps, too.
I think for a MUSH, not letting administrators hold the positions of in-game power is a great step. That's usually the biggest problem with administrators playing PCs. For RPIs, because things like skill-gain and crafting are automated systems, and there is non-consentual permanent death, there are other problems too:
- Loading superior equipment for your character to use or sell.
- Changing your character's stat/skill sheets.
- Spying on other PCs that are in IC opposition to yours, to give you a meta-gaming advantage.
And many others, too. I definitely think there's more danger in staff playing PCs in non-MUSHes. And while I can regulate my own staff, largely, what happens if I take a leave of absence or move on to another project?
By finding staff that want to be staff more than they want to be players, I feel like I avoid getting the sort of "administrator" on my team that's motivation for climbing the ranks is largely to benefit himself. And having that policy definitely does a lot to increase players' trust in me.
In the RPI Community, many games have burned players with cheating issues. Players aren't as trusting as they were 10, 20 years ago. That's why, for me, it's better just to not take any chances at all.
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There's a ton of debate on these issues within the MUSH community (whether and what staff should play, how common PC death should be, how combat should be setup and how to automate it/simplify it, etc,), and you'll find tons of games that have implemented them differently. I suspect searching this very site would provide you with many threads where whether or not staff should play on their games is discussed (I think they should, with limits on position, but not everyone thinks that and I'm not shocked fellow MUSHers don't agree with me on all things). It's not a monolith, just like I don't think anyone who's played RPIs would say they're overly monolithic, either (that's the impression from players of them not affiliated with OR who've commented in this thread, at least).
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@Jaunt said:
I agree in regards to player experience. We use a toolset that lets us snoop players to see their real-time input/output from their perspective. We use this to keep up on what folks are doing, but also to view gameplay and experience through their eyes.
That's probably not something I'd see go over well in a MUSH. After all quite a lot of the player input is all sorts of rather personal communication.
@Jaunt said:
Loading superior equipment for your character to use or sell.
Changing your character's stat/skill sheets.
Spying on other PCs that are in IC opposition to yours, to give you a meta-gaming advantage.Most of those are concerns on many MUSHes as well. On our game every member of staff had access to every character sheet, every faction board, every player request etc, that makes any sort of conflict with a staff PC ludicrously one-sided before you even take into account deliberate cheating.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
It's not a monolith, just like I don't think anyone who's played RPIs would say they're overly monolithic, either (that's the impression from players of them not affiliated with OR who've commented in this thread, at least).
That's spot on. There's a lot of variance in terms of style, execution and policies -- in both communities.
@Groth said:
Most of those are concerns on many MUSHes as well. On our game every member of staff had access to every character sheet, every faction board, every player request etc, that makes any sort of conflict with a staff PC ludicrously one-sided before you even take into account deliberate cheating.
I do think those issues become even more problematic if a core feature of your game is non-consent permanent death. They're definitely not good mojo in either scenario, though.
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Personally, I don't think it would be wise to go the monetary advertising route with MUSHes or RPIs that use commercial properties. The average MUSH already skirts a thin line when it comes to the legality of its existence, as the average one would be like advertising an interactive fan fiction.
I believe that the most wise form of promotion would be to learn how non-MUs promote their RPs, and promote a MU through those means. It's almost always going to be a casual way rather than ads or anything like that. Generally, if it works for a business, it's probably best to avoid it in a MU, unless you're running a commercial MUD with an original theme that's actually there to make money (And any such MUDs do run ads).
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@HelloProject
Yep. You're definitely right on the money. And like I said a few times, there's value in both commercial and non-commercial MU*s.
I do think that our corner of MUdome would benefit from some commercial representation, though, to draw in younger players that don't even know that you can roleplay online in any sort of meaningful way.
To my knowledge, there's never been a commercial RPI or MUSH. It's what we're working at with Redshift (using the Evennia Engine), and it's definitely the most challenging MU* that I've ever personally created because of it. Fun, though. Re-inventing the wheel in a more modern and hopefully improved/streamlined way has been a great undertaking for Apollo and I.
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@Jaunt said:
I do think those issues become even more problematic if a core feature of your game is non-consent permanent death. They're definitely not good mojo in either scenario, though.
I don't think the issues are problematic if you have good staff. In fact, none of these scenarios of doom-and-gloom arise if the staff can be trusted with the power they have.
As an administrator, if you don't trust your staff, why are they staff?
I understand the concern, but I, like many ex-staff, despise setting policies based on the lowest-common denominator's behavior.
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@Ganymede said:
I don't think the issues are problematic if you have good staff. In fact, none of these scenarios of doom-and-gloom arise if the staff can be trusted with the power they have.
As an administrator, if you don't trust your staff, why are they staff?
I understand the concern, but I, like many ex-staff, despise setting policies based on the lowest-common denominator's behavior.
To me the problem is not if I trust staff or not, the problem is if the players trust staff. Staff trust is one of the most valuable commodities a game has and giving the players various guarantees to protect them against bad behaviours they might have encountered in other games is one way to earn that trust.
It's the same reason that you don't want a judge to rule on their family members. If they're a good judge they'll judge fairly either way, but even if they do it'll look bad and damage the trust in the system.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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The problem's arc isn't immediate. I'll use Shadows of Isildur as a good example of this.
SOI was created by a guy who was one of the originators of the "RPI" sub-genre. He was a good admin. He brought good staff with him. They were mostly good admins. No problems. They allowed staff to play PCs, and that became the culture at SOI.
After years of running SOI, though, that fellow (Traithe) had to pass his game on to someone else. Real life became too much for him. And so, Japheth took over. Japheth was a good admin. Most of Japheth's staff SEEMED like good admins. But, Japheth got a new job after a time, and it became evident that he, too, needed to pass the game onto someone else.
And so, a guy named Kite came into control of the game. Kite and his friends began doing some rather ... unsavory things on SOI. All of the sudden, his and his wife's clan took over an entire region, even though it didn't make sense. Staff PCs began to get extreme boosts to statistics, skill levels, equipment. They loaded up equipment for themselves. They stole player donations to the game and pocketed it. They plotted on their administrator chat on ways that they could kill off their characters' in-game rivals.
And then, there was the inevitable conflict with the playerbase. A mass exodus happened. Within a year, SOI went from having over 100 players on at its peak times to having fewer than 5 players on. It shut down. It's since re-opened under different leadership, but it's never recovered.
Now, Kite didn't look like a bad admin to Japheth. Sure, he played his PC a lot, but he didn't cheat until he took over the game.
I guess my belief is that people like Kite (and many of his fellow admins) wouldn't even be interested in running a game if they weren't able to also play PCs. I've never had a problem with admin cheating on my games since my philosophies have shifted, and I think that a big part of that is that the sort of staff that I recruit are dedicated first and foremost to administration of the game. That's what's fun for them.
The sort of person that cheats is also the sort of person that is going to do their best to hide the fact that they're that type of person. A lot of games change ownership. In the case that I ever change ownership, I want to pass on my philosophy, a culture where administrators are dedicated to that aspect of the community as opposed to their player characters, onto whomever might take over for me.
It's just one way to go about it, but I haven't had any issues since I've applied the approach, and it's definitely done a lot to generate a better relationship between staff and players for me.
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@Groth said:
To me the problem is not if I trust staff or not, the problem is if the players trust staff.
As you've pointed out, Groth, staff will always have superior power over players. You can't change this, even if you hobble their PCs. If staff want to screw you, they will, no matter what policies are put into place. In my experience, every policy calculated to check staff power or interests can be overridden or ignored, and is ultimately useless. Worse, they are often twisted to justify otherwise immoral acts.
You cannot reasonably compare the situation to judges and their family members. Judges can be impeached and censured in a variety of meaningful ways. Staff cannot, other than removing them.
Character is what is most important. And vigilance by administrators..
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@HelloProject said:
Personally, I don't think it would be wise to go the monetary advertising route with MUSHes or RPIs that use commercial properties. The average MUSH already skirts a thin line when it comes to the legality of its existence, as the average one would be like advertising an interactive fan fiction.
Yeah, that's the thing. Charging money for something introduces real, legal intellectual property questions that (despite what Nymeria thinks), will fly under the radar 99% of the time as long as something stays free. Especially when you're getting to the point where you make enough money to call something a full-time job (and theoretically have tax and business filings). @Jaunt mentioned Shadows of Isildur. Could you run a LotR pay-for-play game without giving the Tolkien estate/Tolkien Enterprises a cut? What about the various other entities that have some rights to individual book content, like the various studios invested in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings?
Professionalizing original content wouldn't be a big deal, since you just need to work out licensing and ownership with you-the-creator and you/whoever-the-coder, but so much of this hobby overlaps with various fan communities that that's a Pandora's box probably best left alone.
