Eldritch - A World of Darkness MUX

[Miss Demeanor]

@Thenomain Let me clarify again, I wasn't trying to attack you or your decision directly. I just personally don't feel that removing the Dark flag will resolve anything in the long run. If anything, I wonder if it won't make players more resentful when they can clearly see a staffer online and being useless than when they simply can't see the staffer at all. I might grumble about a particular staffer always being dark, but I will personally be more upset and angry at a staffer just blatantly sitting on their staffbit and doing fuckall every time I log in. Its that whole 'out of sight, out of mind' thing, I suppose.

[Misadventure]

Players can nudge their clients to not see things like Away Messages, and Staffers online.

[Rook]

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I might grumble about a particular staffer always being dark, but I will personally be more upset and angry at a staffer just blatantly sitting on their staffbit and doing fuckall every time I log in. Its that whole 'out of sight, out of mind' thing, I suppose.

This just goes back, I think, to the core issue of people being distracted by other things, be it work, kids, meal-making, bosses, having wild kinky sex in the other room, porn, another game, or just sleeping at the keyboard. They are logged in, but idle.

Players idle waiting for staff, waiting for Something to Happen (tm), waiting for <Person X> to log in, or just because they have no one to RP with. I'll try not to rant about this whole phenomenon, we've all see a WHO list full of people in separate rooms all day, idle.

Staffers are no different. It's the same people behind that name that you see logged in on other games, idle for the above reasons. I have only seen two instances of a staffer actively avoiding/ignoring players in my decades of playing, so I don't that it happens a lot. But, I'm naive, so we'll let me live in my dreamworld.

Nothing code-wise or policy-wise will change this idling behavior. I'd be interested in a study that sees, of the people who staff somewhere, do they idle more on their staffer alt than their PC alts? My instinct says yes. And not always for 'good' reasons (they want to catch questions in scrollback when they wake up, get home from work, and essentially strive to be as productive and helpful as possible).

[Miss Demeanor]

I can only speak from my experience as staff and dealing with staff. Yes, staffers WILL spend SOME time idling. It happens. People have lives. That said, if someone is ALWAYS idle for hours at a time? There's an issue there. There's never NOT jobs that need monkeying. There's generally people with questions. Or time stops that need adjudicating. Or.. or.. or.. the list goes on. A staffer that's occasionally idle? Usually not a big deal. A staffer that is always idle? Proooooooobably not doing their job. In my experience. YMMV

[Thenomain]

@Arkandel said:

However that puts a slight onus on staff to make it clear what's yet to be determined and what's in the brainstorming or design phases, otherwise toes will get stepped on both ways.

You know, I must have edited this out because I can't find my saying this: I consider this code an attempt to have a more honest conversation between Players and Staff.

I don't intend use the word "conversation" lightly. What goes on between Players and Staff, and Staff and Staff, and Players and Players, should be an ongoing conversation. How else are you going to discover, change, and inform people to the game's culture?

The things Staff allows Players to do is just as much part of this discussion to them putting down in a news file. Moreso, even, because so much gets written down that never gets referenced again until someone needs to use it as a weapon against someone they don't like. A rule that isn't enforced isn't a rule.

Game culture is a thing that is constantly changing, so sometimes code becomes a liability or misinforms the intent, in which case it shouldn't be worked around (tons of bbposts), but altered or removed. Again, tool.

Toes will get stepped on. Like people learning a new dance, it will happen, and so we rely on the kindness of strangers, a kindness that should exist all the same. To tangent slightly, I hate it when even an old player to a game tries out a new sphere and is sneered at for not knowing the dance.

So yeah, I'm not afraid to see if I can force open this discussion further. If Staff pushes back against it, shame on them, but it is a feedback you don't get when people are just plain Dark. If Players push back, shame on them, but it informs their expectations. Get Dark out in the light and deal with it.

And no, I do not believe that planning for every eventuality, writing everything down, is ever going to work. No plan survives the first encounter with anyone who isn't thinking exactly like you.

---

@Rook said:

I'd be interested in a study that sees, of the people who staff somewhere, do they idle more on their staffer alt than their PC alts?

I don't think you need a study. Staff Alts idle to keep in touch. PC Alts idle for the same reason, but the potentially missed information isn't as critical.

Mind you, if anyone who goes out with friends, enjoys their weekend, come back, comes back and can't get back up to speed, something's wrong. Either the staffer isn't suitable for the speed of the game, or the game runs too fast.

In my world, a game that requires you to take its pulse more than once every few days is going too fast. We shouldn't be beholden to the biggest spaz.

[Chime]

I can only speak from my experience as staff and dealing with staff. Yes, staffers WILL spend SOME time idling. It happens. People have lives. That said, if someone is ALWAYS idle for hours at a time? There's an issue there.

This is often a bad assumption caused by overly-complex code and poor +who implementations.

Consider a typical workflow:

• Codestaffer or similar launches a TinyFugue session within a screen/tmux session, has it configured for autologging and log rotation -- note also that this "startup" can happen without the user being online, awake, or even alive.
• This connection stays up and connected forever.
• As the user goes about their day/week/life, they log in and out from various locations and additional clients as needed -- sometimes with a new client and sometimes by reattaching to their screen/tmux session.
• The user is quick and responsive for a fair number of hours most days, and possibly even has published office hours.

Given that, when only the TF session is running -- detached -- random users on the mush will see that staffer as idle. They might see them as idle for days or weeks, even if they were chatting just seconds ago.

Haunted Memories especially fell victim to this, as lots of us there understood and used this technology in exactly that fashion. End users just could not wrap their head around the concept. Awkwardly enough, a variety of staffers and players in this boat couldn't either.

So. What can we learn from this?

• Everyone is an idiot.
• If you think this is a reason to enable idletimeout, you're an idiot.
• If you think rewriting +who, who, +finger, page @mail look SESSIONS and all myriad commands and bits of mushcode that tie into user status info (consider places code for example) will cover all cases of this, you're an idiot.
• If you think that this is a good reason to NOT rewrite those things, you're an idiot.
• If you think explaining these details to anyone is going to make an appreciable difference, you're an idiot.

Or perhaps more gracefully:

• Please don't assume anything.

[Rook]

This is all true. Every bit of it. No, I'm not being sarcastic. You can see the experience in these posts, so for those reading and not understanding, re-read and ask questions.

[Miss Demeanor]

@Chime I wasn't even thinking of code staff. They are a strange and mysterious lot to me. I was more thinking of sphere staff or general admins, of which I've seen many simply stay idle online for days or weeks at a time. Not a job done, not a comment given on channels. Mind, this is also mostly taken from TR, since that's the only place I've staffed personally. Everything else that I've heard of about, say, HM staff, is second or third hand stories and generally taken with a grain of salt.

[Apocalycious]

@Chime said:

Haunted Memories especially fell victim to this, as lots of us there understood and used this technology in exactly that fashion. End users just could not wrap their head around the concept. Awkwardly enough, a variety of staffers and players in this boat couldn't either.

I remember some of the situations that came up because of this. This might not have been exact, but it went something like this:

• Implement code to freeze people who haven't logged in for more than 30 days.
• First time the code runs, someone who is ONLINE NOW gets put in the freezer because they've been on more than 30 days and just not disconnected. But their last login was 30 days ago!
• Set code so that it won't freeze online people, either.
• First time they log off, they get frozen that night because they logged in 90 days ago
• Set up custom code that records logout time for all users when they log out, because the game doesn't actually record that
• Update code so that it freezes if the user's last log OUT was > 30 days ago and they're not currently online
• First time the server shuts down with the user still connected, and so the last logout doesn't get recorded because they didn't actually log out, they get frozen when it starts again because their last logIN was like 27 days ago, but their last logOUT was 33 days ago.
• Throw hands in the air, make frustrated noises, update code again, etc etc

[HelloRaptor]

And all because the world ends if somebody hasn't logged in in a month.

If only the universe weren't so cruel.

[Eerie]

So!

We still have a few little kinks and fiddly bits on the structural code wish list, but... we’re now in soft-open! As of yesterday we approved our first batch of mortals, ghouls, wolfbloods and stigmatics and real actual RP happened on our real actual grid. Its kind of ridiculously exciting. I’m hoping to run my first plot scene sometime this week.

We are hoping to open fully in about 3-4 weeks for major template supernaturals, but this last push was kind of rough on our poor @Thenomain, so honestly, it will happen when he’s ready for it to happen. In the meantime we are also taking concepts for Vampires, Demons and Werewolves, and each are welcome to play characters that can later become ghouls or covers or what have you later on if you have no interest whatsoever in a minor template long term.

Chargen is pretty self-serve and approvals have been astonishingly quick thanks to Theno’s code. You can browse http://eldritch.mechanipus.com/w/index.php/Character_Creation and then +help chargen and +help asp for aspirations in game and you should be mostly, aside from a few bbposts about how we’re handling stuff like Professional Training for the time being.

Come play!

eldritch.mechanipus.com 6666

[Thenomain]

We are currently at 1,291,196 characters of code, including comments and how-tos and help files.

It takes a lot of work to look this good.

[Coin]

And we do look good. Ahem.

[Bobotron]

On the wiki, is it just me, or does anyone else seen to have random missing letters in the headings?

[Deleted]

It's a formatting issue. Turn off hardware acceleration in your browser.

[HelloRaptor]

I've got hardware acceleration enabled, and it looks fine.

[Deleted]

If you have the issue, disabling it will fix it.

If you have no issue, you don't need to disable it.

[Bobotron]

@Admiral
I disabled it and it's still weird. I'm missing random letters.

[Deleted]

Sorry then man, it's how I fixed mine.

[Coin]

@Bobotron, what browser are you using?