Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

[Derp]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

with an explicit notice that donations are completely optional and won't give the donor anything in return except the knowledge that they are supporting something they like.

Why?

This isn't even a model that's supported by most systems that we use today. Amazon has Prime. Duolingo has its premium service. Hell, even Pornhub does.

All of them have free options. All of them have some sort of measurable bonus for a subscription. There is really no reason that MU via Patreon couldn't be the same. Free to play/use, but if you want to donate to the upkeep and such, you get some kind of shiny that other people may or may not care about.

You probably wouldn't get a lot of people on pay-to-play. But you'd get a hell of a lot more donations on a free-to-play with benefits for donation tiers.

[Griatch]

@Derp Offering a pointless "shiny" may be ok I guess. But the context of this question (in my mind) is avoiding getting to a point where donors get the expectations of "paying customers". As long as it's clear to both sides that donations are just that and are not making you a "paying customer" I think any payment solution is fine.

Otherwise I feel that you as a "hobbyist" are moving beyond it being just a hobby and need to correspondingly step up to the expectations of a paying customer base. If that's your goal, great, that means you just started a small business. If not, it's a line one should not cross without forethought.

[ZombieGenesis]

I honestly never understood the mentality that "all players must be given equal opportunities regardless of the effort put into the game". God forbid a staffer get, like, an extra alt or access to something rare and unusual for the time and effort they put into a game. I once let staffers get first dibs on characters for all the work they put into a game and I was roasted to hell and back by some because of it. I get not letting "all the cool stuff" available only to staffers and their friends(which has happened) but the knee jerk reaction to staff or donors getting something special is extreme to me to say the least.

[Tinuviel]

I'd be okay for donors to get some sort of perk, like an extra alt slot or something, but absolutely nothing that actually impacts the game. Extra IC money, or gear, or skill points or w/e. And they should not get any more input on game decisions than an ordinary player. The last thing one wants is to foster the mentality of "I pay you, so do what I want."

[Derp]

@ZombieGenesis

People want all of the benefits for none of the work. And then still lay into staff like they're owed something. It's ludicrous.

I reward people that are willing to make the game a better place. Staffers, PrP runners. Hell, even just people who make neatly defined groups with a clear theme.

If you can't be bothered to take even that preliminary step, then I won't actively punish you, but I'm certainly not going to reward you.

[Arkandel]

@tek said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

As one of the newer MUers I've encountered (I'm about three years into the hobby), these are some of the unwritten conventions I had to learn the hard way:

1. Pose order and how people like to handle that
2. It was hard for me to learn that most people aren't into lots of OOC chatting
3. Pose length and what to put in my poses -- I didn't realize it was expected that I should not only write what my character does, but that everyone (or the majority of folks) in the scene with me generally expects to be acknowledged, usually by name.

I don't think these are universal concepts though. Game culture has a lot more to do with what the posing conventions and expectations are than anything else, and as such they can vary a lot between different MU*.

In my opinion this isn't a barrier to entry. For new players though, especially ones who can't casually type 80-90 words per minute, I'd say fast paced games are probably a safer bet.

[Ganymede]

@ZombieGenesis said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I honestly never understood the mentality that "all players must be given equal opportunities regardless of the effort put into the game".

Because most of us, if not all of us, have been on a game where: (1) some players are given privileges despite putting no fucking effort into it; or (2) players are denied opportunities regardless of the effort put into the game..

[Tinuviel]

@Ganymede I would add, too, that there are simply not enough hours in the day for some of us to invest in staffing, and/or PRP running, or whatever else. If the perks have a tangible effect on the game-world (character advancement or whatever) then I see that as a punishment for those of us that only have time to play.

[Auspice]

This makes me feel better about having my PC on SGM in a player's PRP. I really enjoyed the scene, but the whole time I was a little antsy that someone would come along and be mad that a Staff PC was in a PRP.

...but I'm still not brave enough to run plots that let me put my own PC into scenarios I wanna play. I'll keep sitting here, fingers crossed, that someday someone runs one for me. >.>

[Tat]

@silverfox said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Regardless: Totally not trying to shovel shit. I'd gotten the misunderstanding that the main strength of the web portal was to allow for those longer scenes as people were able to pose. I didn't realize it was generally used almost as a replacement client. My bad.

It's kind of hard to really get how transformational something like the scene system and the Ares web portal really is to the M*ing experience until you play with it. I feel like I was a solid 6 months in before I stopped regularly exclaiming over something - and I still do it on occasion.

A system like this has several main benefits, but by far the biggest one is the freedom from the need for a constant, active telnet connection, and the correlation of that connection to a single character bit.

Last night I was in a scene that went late, and when we decided to pause, I just closed my client and went to bed. This morning, the whole scene is still there, waiting for me. I can recall it in my client, or read it on the web portal.

I have small kids, and I often write up set poses for things I'm GMing that night during the day. On a persistent web platform, I can write it, start the scene, and leave it sit there until start time, when the other players can join the scene and see what I've already written while I finish up bedtime.

I go home for lunch. I don't have to pause scenes anymore. Instead, I can leave a scene I was RPing slowly in at work and toss in a pose while I'm home at lunch, from the web portal. Or shoot off an IC text on my walk to a meeting. We have players who RP on their long commute home, on their phones - another way the portal helps timezones be less of an issue.

If I'm going to be 30 minutes late to a scene, I don't have to be sure to log on and drop my character into the room or find someone to paste me what I'd missed. I just pull it up on the portal and read it. (Incidentally, this also cuts down on the need to 'scene set' every time someone new joins a scene, which is freeing).

I can GM for people in timezones vastly different from me over the course of a day or even two. It's not my ideal type of scene, but it lets me involve players who previously would have just had to suck it up and not be in GMed stuff on games that I run.

I can RP in other scenes while I do this. I can RP in several scenes at once, if my time, attention, and internal timeline allow. I can finish up that scene from last night, and also have a text scene throughout the course of my work day about something that's pressing to another character. I personally don't like to double up on 'real' scenes very often, but the CAPABILITY is so freeing when I want or need to.

These are the sorts of limitations I didn't even realize existed with telnet only until I was freed of them. And they're just the ones revolving around RP. There are dozens more. The ability to set up my character in a graphical interface. To search logs. To see the same thing on the game and the web according to my mood. To not spam my screen with 'combat' a billion times - or to spam it and not care, because the log will be clean anyway, and I can always pull up the scene on the portal to see it without the HUD displayed. To casually page someone with something and know that they'll see it as soon as they log back on (or check the web portal - it's basically the same thing these days). To organize and filter jobs and respond to them in a graphical interface.

All of these things that we've gotten used to are things that are barriers to entry, for new people (whether young or not). They increase how much you have to WANT to do this hobby. Most of them, we don't even notice anymore, I think. Until suddenly they're gone.

Noticing these things, and figuring out how to remove them, is important. And hard.

[Auspice]

@Tat said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I often write up set poses for things I'm GMing that night during the day. On a persistent web platform, I can write it, start the scene, and leave it sit there until start time, when the other players can join the scene and see what I've already written while I finish

I do this (when I remember: I still have that habit of prepping a scene set in a text file or GDoc and copy/pasting it over).

I also prepare combat this way. While I'm waiting on players to pose, if I know combat is coming 'in a few rounds,' I can go and configure it and make sure everything is right........ rather than having to call a hold while I do it all in the client, risking missing any questions/etc due to spamming myself.

(Pre-Ares, with the FS3 plugin, I would often use an alt to manage this.)

[Tehom]

The early announcement of an upcoming new proprietary programming language called 'Dark' made me immediately think of how it could apply to MU*. It's designed from the ground up to be a language based around ease of deployment - it requires you to be in their own editor where code is sandboxed in an environment in prod, with built-in versioning via feature flags. The notion of built-in controls for how someone can change an environment with massive guard rails that prevent anyone from breaking the build and dead-simple deployment was made with enterprise-scale deployments in mind, but it's hard to imagine something easier for people to engage with for hobbyists.

The downside is if the company ever went out of business they'd take your entire game with it, and it probably wouldn't be free to use. Still, some of the ideas from it might be worth trying to adapt into other languages.

[Griatch]

@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

The early announcement of an upcoming new proprietary programming language called 'Dark' made me immediately think of how it could apply to MU*. It's designed from the ground up to be a language based around ease of deployment - it requires you to be in their own editor where code is sandboxed in an environment in prod, with built-in versioning via feature flags. The notion of built-in controls for how someone can change an environment with massive guard rails that prevent anyone from breaking the build and dead-simple deployment was made with enterprise-scale deployments in mind, but it's hard to imagine something easier for people to engage with for hobbyists.

The downside is if the company ever went out of business they'd take your entire game with it, and it probably wouldn't be free to use. Still, some of the ideas from it might be worth trying to adapt into other languages.

This may be going a bit off-topic I guess, but ...
Requiring to be in their own editor sounds a bit iffy to me. As for ease of deployment, I reckon in an embedded mode, none of these embedded languages would be something the end user would install and configure on their own ... it would most likely come as a component for another system, so deployment is less of a concern in that respect (even though it's nice for the core dev of course).
How does Dark improve on, say Lua, which is an existing language commonly used for embedding and which, as far as I understand, is also reasonably sandboxed in that form?

[Tehom]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

The early announcement of an upcoming new proprietary programming language called 'Dark' made me immediately think of how it could apply to MU*. It's designed from the ground up to be a language based around ease of deployment - it requires you to be in their own editor where code is sandboxed in an environment in prod, with built-in versioning via feature flags. The notion of built-in controls for how someone can change an environment with massive guard rails that prevent anyone from breaking the build and dead-simple deployment was made with enterprise-scale deployments in mind, but it's hard to imagine something easier for people to engage with for hobbyists.

The downside is if the company ever went out of business they'd take your entire game with it, and it probably wouldn't be free to use. Still, some of the ideas from it might be worth trying to adapt into other languages.

This may be going a bit off-topic I guess, but ...
Requiring to be in their own editor sounds a bit iffy to me. As for ease of deployment, I reckon in an embedded mode, none of these embedded languages would be something the end user would install and configure on their own ... it would most likely come as a component for another system, so deployment is less of a concern in that respect (even though it's nice for the core dev of course).
How does Dark improve on, say Lua, which is an existing language commonly used for embedding and which, as far as I understand, is also reasonably sandboxed in that form?

My understanding is it's intended to be a full backend solution with built-in deployment - they even intend to handle database migrations in it. Here's the hackernews thread with the link to the medium article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394166

Getting people to give up the code editors they love will be kind of a hard sell, but it did make me think that in many ways the ease of deployment and controls on modifications by a team that might not be super cohesive has some appeal for MU* development. After all, one of the biggest challenges with requests for softcode in Evennia has been trying to figure out exactly what sort of permissions you grant people: you can't just let them eval() arbitrary text and so on. Maybe adapting their notion of built-in feature flags for everything might be some approach that'd work.

[faraday]

@Tehom said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

My understanding is it's intended to be a full backend solution with built-in deployment - they even intend to handle database migrations in it. Here's the hackernews thread with the link to the medium article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394166

It's kind of interesting, but it sounds like a step backwards. It has many of the same pitfalls that MUSH softcode coding had. Changes live in prod as soon as you hit enter (they can tout "feature flags" all day long but anyone who's tried to implement those in a real-world system knows it never really works out that way in reality), losing the many rich features of common editors, no code review process, no staging.... I will be shocked if it gets any real traction within the software community.

[Deleted]

If everyone keeps looking forward to 'the new code thingy on the horizon' and waiting for it to make things better for MU*s... well. This community has been talking about 'the new code hotness' for as long as I've been a part of it. And the new code toys never solve the problems.

[Tat]

@Admiral Are you sure? I know of someone who's running an Ares game entirely on the web portal for folks she used to RP on Discord with. Never touched a M*. They've said pretty explicitly that their players are young.

I know someone else who set up a sandbox game for her MMO friends, who she used to RP in GDocs with. It's more free form and less formal, but it's an introduction to our way of RPing.

Change takes time. Games running on Ares have only been around for 9 months - and the web portal has changed substantially in that time.

I don't think it's the only solution, or that tech is the only problem, but it is A problem - and it is HELPING.

[Derp]

@Admiral said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This community has been talking about 'the new code hotness' for as long as I've been a part of it. And the new code toys never solve the problems.

Remember Pueblo support?

[faraday]

@Derp said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Remember Pueblo support?

Not every code advancement is a 'win'.

But MUs haven't fundamentally changed in the last 20 years. Sure there have been some technological steps forward - SQL linking, better permissions systems, stuff like that, but most of it has been aimed at coders, not at players. In part because many players really don't want their interfaces to be changed. ("You can have my SimpleMU when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." and stuff like that something I've heard, more than once)

Ares is a little different because it preserves the existing interface for the veterans, while offering new interfaces that address everyday struggles. Playing from work/commute/different timezones, filling out stupid wiki templates, remembering whether it's @desc or +desc, wondering why it's +finger and not something sensible like profile, updating wiki profiles when something changes in-game. Like @Tat said, these are things that us old-time-MUSHers have been doing long enough that we don't think about, but they are significant barriers to entry for someone new. Especially someone from the younger digital native/touchscreen/mobile generations.

Code is not the only solution by any stretch, but it does remove some barriers.

[Prototart]

Once upon forever ago I'd try to get people I knew rl to play on games, wod & comic ones

the problem wasn't really code or whatever, the problem was that - tbh I have no idea how to say this in a non-insulting way:

Normal People find like 99% of MU Culture to be just totally repulsive

and for very good reasons; there are so few games left that people are willing to tolerate just insane levels of corruption and ineptitude and abuse bc "well there's not a better place and this one at least has players" and it just allows for ever worse shit to happen and honestly there's no bottom to the barrel it just goes down forever

And that's ignoring just, the usual social maladaptive shit that's so common on games that it's just taken for granted, the people who have no idea how to interact with anyone who isn't broken the same way they are and the way that geek social fallacies are like burned into the fabric of everything and not to be questioned

so i don't anymore & haven't for years