How does a Mu* become successful?

ThatOneDude

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Random Comments!

Talking about Bartle: Balancing an MMO Ecosystem - Getting a Mix of Player Types - Extra Credits

Yeah, watch this.

@ThatOneDude, you come across to me as a lot more of an Achiever than a Socializer, with a hint of Killer. (Okay, maybe just toward me, but anyway.) I can understand why you might have troubles settling into some Mushes as there is not enough for you to do, the PvE elements not hitting you the right way. I don't have an answer, per se, but I see part of your question as partially "why aren't I having fun". It's a question I ask myself all the time.

I may be wrong in my guesswork, but that's not the important part. I continue.

But why doesn't a small game have more achievement? It has less socializing, which itself turns to less socializing (watch the video), which leads to more people sitting waiting to do something. I think BitN does a pretty good job of creating an atmosphere where anyone who wants to run events without the drawback of having to jump through hoops. In that way, BitN is extremely successful, and I think the staff was counting on this creating the popularity that would create an upward feedback spiral.

Perhaps they need more proactive explorers (e.g., writers)? An interesting thought. Anyhow.

I love PK! No one else really enjoys it for the fun it can be though

It doesn't have to be drama if we all just remember we're playing a fucking game. I didn't really kill you, or piss in your koolaid or call your mother a whore... My PC did >.>

Even to this day, the crew I use to mush with has turned into a group I play with on the PS4. We'll be running around doing whatever and someone will laugh and quote some event from the past in a mush like:

"Remember that time... /insert laughs about PK events from past games/"

As for the bit about BITN I think I have a friend that would say the jumping through hoops part seemed built into the system. Or perhaps we hit the staff on the wrong day or spoke in the "wrong tone".

Thenomain

@ThatOneDude said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I love PK! No one else really enjoys it for the fun it can be though

One of the people I work with plays Rust for the challenge and the back-and-forth PK. And if people you know also love it? Great! If not? Well? Why is it their problem?

I've laughed my ass off about situations where I've lost, or adored the story told, but this is my angle, and my angle doesn't work for you. Visa-versa. Note in that video (you did watch the video, right?), neither Bartle nor the Extra Credits crew said who was responsible for the fun. In fact, they say what we've always known: Those who aren't having fun leave.

In fact, that's what I get out of every time someone puts the words "mush" and "successful" together: How do we stop people from leaving?

If you're secretly trying to deconstruct BitN, I can't help you. I listen to staff chat (because coder) and I hear more "hee hee that was awesome" more than "goddamn it, insert-player-name-here", so I have to believe that staff are enjoying the game. I also have to assume that anyone playing there is enjoying themselves enough to play there, or I have to wonder about their sanity. Sounds like a winner to me.

THAT SAID, I have continued playing on games I didn't enjoy, but I enjoyed the people I was with. People are looking for the key to upward positive feedback and game growth. This is it. One person, @ThatGuyThere, has it right on. Everything past that is a deconstruction about what you enjoy about a game.

There is a certain tipping point where the game can be complete and utter shit with shit staffers and shit situations and still have a high population. I put this critical mass around 20 players. In the video (you watched the video, right?), this is the social circle. Maybe all that happens is TS and IC Drama, but hey, it's popular, right? I have to believe the people there are enjoying themselves, because anything else is just sad.

Please Note: Fun is not the same as Enjoyment. I usually assume people mean the latter when they say the former, but we can all enjoy ourselves without having 'fun'.

So yeah, +1 to @ThatGuyThere for the truest answer, and +1 to everyone else for figuring out how to make that happen.

ThatOneDude

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@ThatOneDude said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I love PK! No one else really enjoys it for the fun it can be though

One of the people I work with plays Rust for the challenge and the back-and-forth PK. And if people you know also love it? Great! If not? Well? Why is it their problem?

I've laughed my ass off about situations where I've lost, or adored the story told, but this is my angle, and my angle doesn't work for you. Visa-versa. Note in that video (you did watch the video, right?), neither Bartle nor the Extra Credits crew said who was responsible for the fun. In fact, they say what we've always known: Those who aren't having fun leave.

In fact, that's what I get out of every time someone puts the words "mush" and "successful" together: How do we stop people from leaving?

If you're secretly trying to deconstruct BitN, I can't help you. I listen to staff chat (because coder) and I hear more "hee hee that was awesome" more than "goddamn it, insert-player-name-here", so I have to believe that staff are enjoying the game. I also have to assume that anyone playing there is enjoying themselves enough to play there, or I have to wonder about their sanity. Sounds like a winner to me.

THAT SAID, I have continued playing on games I didn't enjoy, but I enjoyed the people I was with. People are looking for the key to upward positive feedback and game growth. This is it. One person, @ThatGuyThere, has it right on. Everything past that is a deconstruction about what you enjoy about a game.

There is a certain tipping point where the game can be complete and utter shit with shit staffers and shit situations and still have a high population. I put this critical mass around 20 players. In the video (you watched the video, right?), this is the social circle. Maybe all that happens is TS and IC Drama, but hey, it's popular, right? I have to believe the people there are enjoying themselves, because anything else is just sad.

Please Note: Fun is not the same as Enjoyment. I usually assume people mean the latter when they say the former, but we can all enjoy ourselves without having 'fun'.

So yeah, +1 to @ThatGuyThere for the truest answer, and +1 to everyone else for figuring out how to make that happen.

Oh don't get me wrong, I think I've come to that point in my life where I'll never be able to mu* ever again. But I think this conversation was a good one to have in the community as a whole. More so for those people talking of making their own games and hopefully running it in a way that's good for players and themselves.

Thenomain

@ThatOneDude

Eh, it comes up every few years. Game design philosophy is never a bad one to have.

Kestrel

@ThatOneDude said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@ThatOneDude said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I love PK! No one else really enjoys it for the fun it can be though

One of the people I work with plays Rust for the challenge and the back-and-forth PK. And if people you know also love it? Great! If not? Well? Why is it their problem?

I've laughed my ass off about situations where I've lost, or adored the story told, but this is my angle, and my angle doesn't work for you. Visa-versa. Note in that video (you did watch the video, right?), neither Bartle nor the Extra Credits crew said who was responsible for the fun. In fact, they say what we've always known: Those who aren't having fun leave.

In fact, that's what I get out of every time someone puts the words "mush" and "successful" together: How do we stop people from leaving?

If you're secretly trying to deconstruct BitN, I can't help you. I listen to staff chat (because coder) and I hear more "hee hee that was awesome" more than "goddamn it, insert-player-name-here", so I have to believe that staff are enjoying the game. I also have to assume that anyone playing there is enjoying themselves enough to play there, or I have to wonder about their sanity. Sounds like a winner to me.

THAT SAID, I have continued playing on games I didn't enjoy, but I enjoyed the people I was with. People are looking for the key to upward positive feedback and game growth. This is it. One person, @ThatGuyThere, has it right on. Everything past that is a deconstruction about what you enjoy about a game.

There is a certain tipping point where the game can be complete and utter shit with shit staffers and shit situations and still have a high population. I put this critical mass around 20 players. In the video (you watched the video, right?), this is the social circle. Maybe all that happens is TS and IC Drama, but hey, it's popular, right? I have to believe the people there are enjoying themselves, because anything else is just sad.

Please Note: Fun is not the same as Enjoyment. I usually assume people mean the latter when they say the former, but we can all enjoy ourselves without having 'fun'.

So yeah, +1 to @ThatGuyThere for the truest answer, and +1 to everyone else for figuring out how to make that happen.

Oh don't get me wrong, I think I've come to that point in my life where I'll never be able to mu* ever again. But I think this conversation was a good one to have in the community as a whole. More so for those people talking of making their own games and hopefully running it in a way that's good for players and themselves.

Just curious, if you think you're at the point in your life where you'll never be able to MU* ever again, why make this thread? My question is 100% serious. What were you hoping to learn? And what's your conclusion about MU* success potential, etc.?

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@Kestrel, I'm drawing your attention here in case you're skimming (god knows I do): Moo used an in-game editor but a more realistic, flexible language. One of the single worst things about using Mush for coding is that it can be ten times harder to do something cool in Mush than almost any other language.

It's not that Mushes can't have mobs and things, a gigantic game called Firan proved that wrong, it's that it's not worth it. I mean, we're busy implementing a codified RPG. God, the language code we used to have was pretty damn complex too. At one point, if you knew French you could pick up smaller snippets of other Romance Languages depending on how similar or dissimilar they were from French, all the way down to "I don't know what they're saying, but I know that it's kinda Greek-like" for 'Ancient Greek'.

You want secrets? Damn did we have them. It's possible. It takes time, but the most important thing as a game is will someone use it because if not, why bother? And people started complaining about it. And we killed the general WoD secrets culture. And it faded into obscurity.

Which of my posts were you responding to with that mention? As I don't think that, personally, I would ever attempt to code any of this stuff on a MUSH with the intention of making 'a successful MU*'. As stated above, I think 'a successful MU*' would be a MU* that isn't a MU* at all. Why try to improve on something so unwieldy when its audience and function could be fulfilled by something better and more user-friendly?

acceleration

Only semi-relevant, but I second MUSHes being unwieldy as fuck. They're so byzantine and a product that clearly came out of the past. Syntaxes for @emit and @pemit and @channel and +finger and whatever else aren't at all user friendly, but it seems like 80% of MUSHers have been MUSHing forever and are used to it so no one wants to switch to anything more usable. That's one thing IRE kind of leads in in that it has that GUI browser client (although IRE has its own set of problems in that it requires coding to play...)

Thenomain

@Kestrel

I was mentioning you so that you, and others, would know what a Moo is. Also, you lamented the lack of secrets in Mushes in the other thread. As as I was going down the history of the Modern Mush, it felt relevant.

Why try to improve on something so unwieldy when its audience and function could be fulfilled by something better and more user-friendly?

So, my recent Mud experience was me asking why some exits were hilited and some weren't. "The hilites were for certain rooms at the other end," I was told. I replied asking why I, in the information/newbie nexus, couldn't go through them. "Because they're not for you," I was told, "they're for experts." Well then they shouldn't be hilited, I said, because that's confusing. At that point I started getting talk-back like I was a problem player, tho what I was doing was engaging in a little UX discussion to make it more user-friendly.

So the answer is: Preach it, Sister. If only Muds were more user-friendly, I might play more of them.

Wait, are you talking about the code? Oh, momentum mostly. Evennia is the closest thing to a Mush replacement we have these days, and even it has a development barrier too high to just pick it up and run with it.

I think 'a successful MU*' would be a MU* that isn't a MU* at all.

Which is funny, because most of what you said you would do or that your friend would do has been done before. Play By Post integration: RP over a Jobs system (mostly complained about). Dynamic grid: Part of what we gave up years ago (still used in spaceship games). Web-Interface: Evennia and any Muck coded by Nuku. Auto-logging features: Every client ever. Player/Character profiles: Wiki and, in-game, finger.

We're already there.

Mind you, I have to ask: How would these things make it successful? What is 'successful' here?

Ide

With all due respect Theno I don't think you can say in good faith that mu*'s have already tried the changes Kestrel is talking about when those changes are locked behind the basic UX of mu*'ing itself. Look at a game like Storium or whatever it was called. It attracted huge interest and was a half-assed attempt at mu*, but with a contemporary UX.

Thenomain

@Ide

Alright, I see what you're saying. As she's stating it, tho, we've applied all of that, almost all of that on the same games, and I wouldn't have called it a success. The fact that we have regressed to the older, shittier UX of Mu*, whether Mud or Mush, is my evidence of that.

Why did we? No real answer. Momentum, probably. Is Storium still going? Is it popular? Is it a success? Maybe if it wasn't behind a paywall I'd try it out long-term and see.

I really do see Evennia as the only modern attempt in the current culture. I've looked around for other offerings, but as an open-writer's play-space, there aren't many.

For a MUD, I understand Icewind Dale (sorry, brain dead, I can't remember the isomorphic game with tons of editing tools) was pretty damn popular with user-created modules.

Lithium

IMHO this is all nonsense.

Success is people having fun.

Full stop.

It's a game, if people are playing the game and having fun, then it is a success.

You can try and quantify it as more people having fun on your game but, that doesn't always happen and isn't a useful metric anyways. Are people having fun, are you having fun running the game, maintaining it, etc?

If yes, then it is a success.

Kanye Qwest

@Thenomain Neverwinter Nights!

ThatGuyThere

@Ide said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

With all due respect Theno I don't think you can say in good faith that mu*'s have already tried the changes Kestrel is talking about when those changes are locked behind the basic UX of mu*'ing itself. Look at a game like Storium or whatever it was called. It attracted huge interest and was a half-assed attempt at mu*, but with a contemporary UX.

Storium for me would never be a replacement for a MU. Yes I could get the rp there but the mechanics that were baked into the platform were Meh to me. And sadly to RUn a game there you had to use their mechanics. With a MU* you can use whatever mechanics you can find or write or have written code for.
It might be my age but I have gotten used to user interfaced being horrible. This happened when I was putzing around on a Tandy. I can handle a bad UX far more then poor mechanics in an on-line RPG.

Edit to Add: @Kanye-Qwest Oh hells yeah, I think Neverwinter Nights could be a great base for a MU*.

ThatOneDude

@Kestrel said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Just curious, if you think you're at the point in your life where you'll never be able to MU* ever again, why make this thread? My question is 100% serious. What were you hoping to learn? And what's your conclusion about MU* success potential, etc.?

A friend and I had batted around the idea of making a game. The more thought I put into it the less it sounds like something I'd want to do. I'm the kind of person that doesn't like doing things half ass, its why I'm successful in my professional life. If I were to work on a game I'd want it to be enjoyed, successful and to be able to look at the end result and be happy with what was made. To know it was done the best it could be.

I don't have the drive like I use to but I've been on the fence wondering if I shouldn't just jump into Evennia and code up a new "mu*". I have a BS in CS and know a few languages. From what I've seen of Evennia and what I know of Python it all doesn't seem too difficult. But my issue is at the end of the day I don't think I'd be happy with anything. The hobby as a whole has felt very hollow for a long time.

I don't seem to like most of the people, I don't seem to be in the same "category" in terms of life experience or where I'm at in my life and I don't really need the OOC side of Mu*'s. That just leaves the IC side which is slow, boring and more often than not feels like a huge waste of time (to me). So I think I'm done

Bobotron

@Thenomain
I think your last point about 'game system simulators' makes me miss the days of a coded combat system and a condeath game like the old Transformers or Megaman MUSHes.

Thenomain

@ThatOneDude

I admit, every time I staff I say it's the last time I'll play a Mush. Then I realize it's where the people I know are, and I enjoy solving challenges.

Yeah, I said I'd never code again and there was Eldritch. And then BitN. And now something else. And Mage. And dammit, coming up with easier UX and better methods and hopefully an easy installer is fun.

But seriously, this is the last time.

Sure, Theno. Sure.

Kestrel

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I think 'a successful MU*' would be a MU* that isn't a MU* at all.

Which is funny, because most of what you said you would do or that your friend would do has been done before. Play By Post integration: RP over a Jobs system (mostly complained about). Dynamic grid: Part of what we gave up years ago (still used in spaceship games). Web-Interface: Evennia and any Muck coded by Nuku. Auto-logging features: Every client ever. Player/Character profiles: Wiki and, in-game, finger.

We're already there.

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Alright, I see what you're saying. As she's stating it, tho, we've applied all of that, almost all of that on the same games, and I wouldn't have called it a success. The fact that we have regressed to the older, shittier UX of Mu*, whether Mud or Mush, is my evidence of that.

To which I say: you did not apply it well enough. I mean, just because social networks like Friendster existed long before Facebook doesn't mean they were worth their salt, or that there wasn't a better way to do things.

As a simple example, you've raised wiki and finger to my suggestion of player/character profiles, but one of these is accessible from a webpage, the other from a downloadable client, and there is no integration between the two. It's unwieldy. It's more complicated than it needs to be. And I'm not talking about the coder-side of things. Wouldn't it make sense to have everything in one place, in line with how most of these crazy kids like to do things now in 2016?

I'm not trying to shit on the hobby. I love the hobby. I just want more people to love it as much as I do, which is why I would love for more of its pioneers to think a little outside the box.

Mind you, I have to ask: How would these things make it successful? What is 'successful' here?

Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I really like the idea of making lots of money. This isn't my only concern, but if I were going to pour all my energy and resources into a project of this scope, it would be a concern. Having addressed the capitalist elephant in the room, allow me to salvage the remnants of my starry-eyed idealism:

I think MU*s are a dying genre. It isn't a novel thing to think — people have been saying it for years. To me, for a MU* to be considered successful, it would have to exceed the declining expectations of its genre, resuscitate and popularise it. Anything short of a total resurgence in the public eye would be a level of success for a MU* that I wouldn't be interested in wasting my time on, not because I'm really greedy, but because I think the genre is capable of that level of success, because there is a market for it, and it makes me kinda sad that no one other than IRE is tapping into it. And I don't even think IRE is doing a good job of it — their ethics aside, I just think they could be doing better, even on a commercial level.

Lots of people read fiction, participate in improv classes, or identify as aspiring writers. A very, very small percentage of these people play MU*s, but I think that a much larger percentage would be interested, and would play if they even knew what a MU* is, or if upon finding one, they didn't find the newbie experience so odd and unfriendly. It galls me that MUDs keep wasting time building hack-and-slash code to try and compete with WoW-style MMORPGs, or that MUSHes, which are aimed at exactly the right niche, are so badly publicised.

So in sum, what would I consider 'successful' for a MU*? Well, other than having fun, I suppose I would just want to make something that lives up to its potential.

@ThatOneDude: Thanks for answering. See above. Highly relatable.

Thenomain

@Kestrel

You really, really need to look into the Evennia group. @Griatch, I summon thee.

And of course it wasn't applied well enough, but let's start by learning from our mistakes, not just re-inventing the wheel. But to do that, you need to know the history, or at least someone brave enough to say, "We did that" before you eveen have a chance. It's not that "fill in blank" is a bad idea, tho I'm inwardly eye rolling at the ideas you're putting forward. It's that you now have to hit the bar where others have failed. This is definitely more encouragement than criticism.

I'm looking forward to seeing a plan.

Kanye Qwest

Evennia. So nice.

Having staffed on a tinymux game, I am elated with the ease of doing admin through a web interface. I just zipped through and edited the 's' off the end of a half dozen crafting material types for consistency, changed the name of another material and all the dependent recipes on a whim, and was done. 45 seconds.

SkinnyThicket

@Kestrel said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

[...] A friend of mine is currently working on an MU* project where he's looking to really amp up the 'explorer' factor in what I think is a rather novel way — rather than having a traditional grid designed by builders, he wants to create a self-creating, dynamic player-driven grid wherein anything you can imagine wanting would be automatically generated (and then be explorable) the moment you enter a command like, 'goto bar'. If no bar exists, the system would then simply create a bar with a randomised name/description, and other players would have a chance of finding it next time someone uses 'goto bar' as opposed to looking for that bar specifically by its new name/ID. And similarly this could be used for generating and linking generic backstory town-where-I-grew-up, where you may discover that you actually grew up in the same town as another player, allowing for the opportunity to coordinate.

The idea for this came from his hatred of traditional MU* grid-style walking around and the hassle involved in building. He also said he simply didn't want to build a MUD, but something new.

Hi, I'm that friend. I'm not here to do a sale's pitch, 'the game' is cloud of nothing as it stands - an idea, the most inflated currency on Earth. But I love design talk, so this conversation is right up my alley.

@acceleration said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

This sounds interesting. I'd like to hear more details. It sounds mostly like a convenience thing not too far from existing MUSH/MUX +travel systems that allow player builds. It would definitely offer flexibility, but I'm not all that sure it would appeal to explorer types.

I totally agree, and as Loth points out...

@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

[...] In the early 90s, lots of places enabled @quota on players and they were expected to contribute to the shared environment. Build a bar, make a ship, make cars that moved, make puppets that interacted with players and otherwise build the shared world together. At some point, people decided this created too much clutter or used up too much space, and the quota was slowly reduced until, like most places today, its either turned off or set to like 1 which is reserved for one private room, which must be @dug by staff.

All that 'flexibility' can become a nightmare. My goal with tweaking movement and travel was to reduce the legwork between getting to-and-from RP, without the world feeling small and lifeless.

So the system is, essentially, as @Kestrel puts it. It isn't fleshy, and what additions I've been contemplating aren't fundamental, but I'll put them down for the sake of discussion:

Restrictions. The locations are generated from templates, of which each area has an allowance for X amount of templates. There are only three meaningful bars in any given district of a city, for example. If a bar stops being visited, it disappears, and a new one might take its place.
Customization. It's important for RP scenes to have an impact on the world, and for players to fill their spaces with life. So these templates have 'holes' in them for both concrete changes (the name of a bar, its patron, the atmosphere) and transient changes (the tables are broken, the floor is covered in blood).
Locations = Currency. The idea is that having been somewhere enables you to go back there, without trouble. And this information is transferable.

The final idea is that stories should be told between locations, and so every area has the equivalent of 'walking the streets' of a city. In a forest, you might be walking a path, or through the trees. These transient locations give you a sense of time as you move from one location to the other, and through background algorithms, allow you to encounter other players.

And that's it. That's my wheel that is slightly more round.

Thenomain

@SkinnyThicket

I can't tell you how many times people have pitched to me to make a template room system, something a level above temprooms (my favorite code contribution to this hobby). If people use it enough, allow it to become a permanent addition to the grid. Allow people to tweak the description. Remember the bar settings that were set the first time someone put a bar there, for the consistency. A++. Would Assimilate This Code.