Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!
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@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
I've given this some thought over the past couple of days and I feel like I want public scenes to time out rather quick. This is where people should be going for immediate RP right?
Yeah, I see where you're going. As I was thinking about it, there are some scenes that I want/need to last longer, open vignettes and stuff. I still would err more toward shorter timeouts than longer ones; the restart button is right there...
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I do think anything between 24-48 hours is a sweet spot to have scenes auto-closed, particularly with the convenience of the restart button.
Even in the extreme cases, throwing an OOC to keep the scene open is not that hard, even if it might be a slight annoyance.
I don't think this is a problem that can be solved with additional code. I don't even know if it is a problem. Like it sucks that there aren't more games where "live" RP is regularly happening, but it seems like more of a "me" problem than a code problem.
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Considering the thread is ostensibly about thoughts about web portals as related to how something would be developed for Evennia, maybe we could take more specific Ares development thoughts to a different thread or the Ares forum?
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@Roz Seeing as how the exact same issues would affect any web portal scene system designed for evennia, it seems on topic to me?
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@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
I get noting the pace, I always look for pace on a forum game (1 pose a week vs 2-3 poses a day or whatever), it helps me decide. Just an easy way to sort activity would be good without going complex.
Would something as simple as timestamps on poses when you open the scene be helpful then?
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@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
I get noting the pace, I always look for pace on a forum game (1 pose a week vs 2-3 poses a day or whatever), it helps me decide. Just an easy way to sort activity would be good without going complex.
Would something as simple as timestamps on poses when you open the scene be helpful then?
This does help. Ares already shows activity like this on the portal, for any web-portal system this would be helpful to show timestamps for activity. Ixokai 's logger system includes time stamps. These are good tools. The main thing for me is knowing when I see activity (if we're showing activity) is how much is live/synchronous vs how much is asynchronous and how open they are. As said, whether web portal or not, any amount of scenes marked private or just pairs of folks in private locations, I tend to lose interest because this looks uninventing. Long scenes and loggers ... folks have and do use loggers in older Mu formats to just log on, pose, log off also; not unlike long lasting scenes in web-portal (they're just pulling up the log shows when the last post was).
These are two issues, but they seem prevalent on web-portal inclusion and should be things to consider when adding it onto other systems (Evennia).
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Instead of trying to arbitrarily come up with axes and such for scene timing, it seems that people really could be served by just showing "Time Since Last Activity" and "Average Time Between Activity".
Could even be like a 'pace' command for those that are determined to die on that hill.
Not sure it has to be so in depth just to fill a niche desire that is entirely subjective.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@Derp It already shows time since last activity. The average is easily thrown off by outliers, so it's not really a reliable measure.
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In regards to Evennia or other platforms, there are a few nifty UIs for MUDs that do room navigation and whatnot.
https://play.achaea.com/
https://www.mudlet.org/I decided to go in a different direction with Ares obviously, but they're still sleek designs and could give other folks some ideas.
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@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
@Derp It already shows time since last activity. The average is easily thrown off by outliers, so it's not really a reliable measure.
I know it shows time since last activity. Sorry, guess I should have clarified that it really needs an average to give them exactly what they want.
And I agree that outliers tjrow things off, bit it isn't necessarily more unreliable than a self-reported thing.
I don't think there is really a good way to do this but this at least seems easier than fully designing a pacing system that probably still won't please the ten people that see it as make-or-break.
Just a suggestion really.
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@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
There are two "axes" of pacing...
- How fast you can expect poses to come in. For some people, anything more than 10min between poses is "too slow", whereas others might still consider 1-pose-an-hour to be "live".
- How long you can expect the scene to run. Many folks can handle a same-day slow-work-RP scene but would balk at a multi-day one because it mucks with their inner sense of continuity.
I really don't want to have TWO different settings for each scene - that's too complicated.
Thinking out loud here... I totally get the complexities of trying to solve this properly (where it's largely a culture problem, and code can't fix culture).
That said, I really like @L-B-Heuschkel's suggestion of a "live" and "asynchronous" distinction. What if that was automatically displayed based on the average pose speed, with the admins choosing the tipping point as a configuration setting? (Admins could also choose to shut this off and not use it on their game.)
I hear you that average speed is tricky too... but a well-paced scene that suddenly dips to slower for a bit is either really turning into an asynchronous scene, or it's a bogus lull (everyone went to get dinner) and will self-correct when people come back.
Then, I do see value in some way of sharing whether a scene is expected to stretch for more than a day or not. Could there be a checkbox that players tick when creating a scene, to say it's expected to last more than a day? And then, if the scene does last more than a day, that box gets automatically checked for you?
This doesn't replace the Notes field, that people should use to say words about what they have in mind for the scene. It creates a quick metric to see at a glance, how a scene is running.**
Even with your two axes, we'll really only end up with three types of scenes:
- "live" - shorter average pose speed, less than a day.
- "asynch, one-day" - longer average pose speed, probably people at work or busy with RL. Maybe the pace improves when they all get home, maybe not.
- "asynch, multi-day" - yeah, we're gonna take our time with this to play it all out.
You really aren't going to see a live scene go more than 10 or 12 hours. (The game I run now, non-Ares, no portal, has live scenes that occasionally go that long... we have an active Euro/daytime crowd, and and active US/evening crowd... maybe if we also had an APAC crowd we could keep a scene rolling around the clock, but 12 hours seems to be the upper limit right now.)
** Another idea just struck me... what if instead of this being configured for the whole game, each player was able to set "how many minutes do I consider fair, before a scene is asynch instead of live?" Bob can say 15. Sue can say 120. They're shown different flags on the scenes, accordingly.
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I might suggest a much shorter timespan for "live", which implies players actively engaging in the scene at that moment. While there's a lot of wiggle room (5 minutes to like an hour, based on what I've seen in on-grid scenes over the years), I think terming a "live" scene live if people can go 23 hours between poses is like...I dunno make the people who are looking for "people dedicated to posing in this scene continuously right at this moment" go a little bonkers and get extremely frustrated.
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@mietze Yeah, y'all are kinda hitting on the complexities inherent in this, with everyone having their own definitions and expectations. Believe me, I've been round and round on this and haven't come up with a "good" solution. Which is not to say someone else can't come up with something better, just that I have put considerable thought into it and had this same conversation with the Ares community already. Having freeform scene notes seemed like a reasonable compromise.
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@faraday I agree that a free-form note is probably the most useful, though sometimes there seems to be resistance to having to write/read one which is not really understandable to me personally, but it is what it is.
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@mietze Drawing a blank there too. If I write in a scene description and in a note at the top of a scene that this is a slow scene, expect so and so much time to pose, blah blah -- and people complain it's not fast enough, then frankly, no code is going to fix their refusal to read words.
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
@mietze Drawing a blank there too. If I write in a scene description and in a note at the top of a scene that this is a slow scene, expect so and so much time to pose, blah blah -- and people complain it's not fast enough, then frankly, no code is going to fix their refusal to read words.
This is why I keep coming back to wanting the ability to differentiate between timeouts for different scene types. If I set a really short timeout on one type of scene, it will naturally encourage more "live" play there, while I can be more relaxed on another scene type to accommodate people's desire for asynchronous play.
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@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
while I can be more relaxed on another scene type to accommodate people's desire for asynchronous play.
Except that then you're relegating all asynchronous play to private scenes. I'm not in favor of that. But if some game wanted to do that, they could certainly make some custom code to adjust the timeouts based on scene type.
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@faraday Notice I didn't specify open/private in the most recent post. I don't know if creating a live/asynchronous scene type is the answer or a third type of scene or keeping to the current public/private is the right way to go. If the hive mind says "A works best,". I'll defer.
Now, I won't go into all the reasons lest I derail the thread but if I had to take the current scene system and place variable timeouts in top of it, I would make the time out for open scenes really short and for private/closed scenes much, much, much longer.
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Every time this conversation comes up the same people come out to say that "this system just doesn't work for me!!"
A few times, maybe, I would think that it's honestly a preference they're touting. After as many as I've seen though, it seems like there is more than a personal preference at play. I don't know what it is, though I have some guesses.
PERSONALLY:
I've yet to play on an Ares game where when I threw up a general scene set and waited, people didn't show up. Yes, I did make sure there were people "active" on the game within it. I don't... THINK (correct me if I'm wrong) that Ares announces every time a scene opens? So people must have been looking, and I was just the first one who thew down a set and waited for people to come.
I don't do it ~often~ because there's that anxiety of "what if people don't show up" - but I felt that scene sitting too. At least this way I'm being proactive and people know what I want to RP?
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@silverfox No, it doesn't. You need to announce it yourself on the RP channel or similar.
What I usually do is make sure there are two people in an open scene, then announce it. People sometimes hesitate to come in if there's only one person -- whether it's not knowing this person and thinking maybe there's a reason they're alone, or that they're work slow and don't have space for a scene where they are the other person's only focus.
Get two guys talking, though, and four others will be there in ten minutes (provided four guys exist on grid at the time, disclaimer, European timezone stupid, etc).
