Optional Realities & Project Redshift

Thenomain

The purpose of such a thread of conversation, for me, would be education rather than debate, because I don't have many, if any, firm opinions except what I've seen observationally from my own play and interactions.

Sure, then let me explain: A Mush is a game-creation tool with a following based largely on understanding the tool. There is no single culture behind it, but the history of how the tool has been used is informative as to what expectations a "Musher" might have.

Now it's your turn to educate.

Lithium

@Thenomain said:

@mietze said:

I mean really, how can you be logged in to a game that's called burp and not be smiling?

How dare you smile on a game based on the World of DARKNESS. Darrrrrkneeeesssssss*. Mind you, I thought "Start Your Engines" was a very ridiculous name. Every time I saw it I thought that it couldn't be serious.

CrackMUX was far more fun when it wasn't serious, too, and stopped being played when it got ForSrs.

sssssssssssssssssssssss.

CrackMUX was amazing when it was crazy and didn't take itself to seriously. Some of my most fun WoD memories come from CrackMUX...

Lithium

@Jaunt said:

@Lithium said:

Go the fuck home.

Yeah ... nobody's forcing you to read this thread. Nobody's demanding that you read all of the content updates.

And none of us care how many times we're told (through insinuation), "You're too different than me, so get off of my internet space or I'm going to wildly insult you and throw a tantrum."

If we think there's value in advertising here, and we're doing so within the rules, we're going to continue to do so.

I think what's interesting is that all of the talk about our mission statement (the meat of the criticism of our site, with points that I tend to agree with) ... after we admit that the feedback is on the nose there and we're going to take it ... the conversation here reverts back to "you're different, you don't belong, go the fuck away, we don't want you here."

Which is exactly the sort of coarse, aggressive attitude that brought me here to begin with.

The whole entire reason we are coarse, and aggressive, is because you people don't seem to get that you're not wanted.

I think it's fair to say that your initial advertising probably did it's job. It got the attention of the people who would be interested in your site and they went to check it out. They might be very involved in your site now, and that's cool.

Let me repeat: That. Is. Cool.

At first, nobody WANTED your site to fail, it was just an alternate thing and more options are ALWAYS better, as we in the MU* community well know. Then the holier than thou passive aggressive not even bothering to read what people are saying started.

Then the SPAM started.

Then you come here and you try to out troll /us/.

Cuz that is /totally/ going to win you points, and get more people over.

You're like a rabid chijuajua that won't stop yapping and unfortunately, this board won't let us ignore a thread, block a user, or otherwise control our experience on the forums to that extent.

I promise you if we did have those tools a lot less people would bitch because many of us would NEVER see your pedantic diatribes in defense of your poorly written 'theme' or 'charter' or whatever that basically can't even get basic sentence and paragraph structure correct to not piss off much of this community.

Hell, @il-volpe even corrected it for you, probably took 10 seconds, and you STILL haven't changed anything. Instead you defend non-action like your feces don't stink.

Once you try to out troll us though, well, you're going to lose there. Now you're a target. Now you're feeding the trolls as well as being one.

Like @Thenomain said this stopped being a worthy thread for /anything/ a long time ago, especially since you OR admins still refuse to meaningfully engage, instead spitting out piss, vitriol, and unsubstantiated 'No U's'.

In fact, I think it's fair to say, that you're just damaging your brand name now every time you put fingers to the keyboard @Jaunt .

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

Groth

@Lithium said:

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

Well, while every MUSH I've ever been on has been hardcore on the subject of death, that is once you're dead you're dead and you're not coming back through any means, you're often not even allowed to reroll a similar character.

It's also common for MUSHes to make it fairly hard to die. For various reasons we are reluctant to go full non-consent and instead require a number of hoops to be jumped through before someone can actually be killed.

Lithium

@Groth said:

@Lithium said:

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

Well, while every MUSH I've ever been on has been hardcore on the subject of death, that is once you're dead you're dead and you're not coming back through any means, you're often not even allowed to reroll a similar character.

It's also common for MUSHes to make it fairly hard to die. For various reasons we are reluctant to go full non-consent and instead require a number of hoops to be jumped through before someone can actually be killed.

My experience is vastly different than your own.

I've seen people pk'd and permadeath applied a fair few times.

There are games that are consent based, but MUD's for the most part, you die, you might lose your gear you had on you if you can't get to your corpse, but you just respawn. Nothing permanent about that at all.

EDIT: Also, I think it's fair to say that in today's climate, we're moving towards: Player Death is the END of a story and not conducive to MORE story, which is what most people want. That's why there is 'hoops' on some games to avoid player death. Me, personally, think that death should be a part of the story and character creation should be easy, but I think that's a topic for another thread.

Jaunt

@lithium and @il-volpe

At least @thenomain finally admitted that he was wrong in regards to his statistics after a few posts. You continue to make assertions without even taking a look around the OR website.

http://optionalrealities.com/partnership-criteria/

That's new, as of a few days ago, and was what I referenced in terms of changes we've made. Not that actual logic seems to mean much to you. You'd rather just speak on everyone's behalf and try to bully us off your site. Not gonna happen.

As far as the front page revision, I've already written it and sent it to the site's graphic designer. It'll be changed in the next few days, as soon as she sends the pertinent images back to me.

I took the revision effort upon myself, even though that's not really my job, because I agreed with points made by this community.

Unfortunately, it seems as though those criticisms weren't really about actually inspiring change, because as soon as we came to a sort of consensus on the criticisms with the site, you started resorting to shouting at us to leave your community.

Get over yourself.

So, in short, you were wrong, though I suspect that you don't actually care about being right.

@lithium said:

Like @Thenomain said this stopped being a worthy thread for /anything/ a long time ago, especially since you OR admins still refuse to meaningfully engage, instead spitting out piss, vitriol, and unsubstantiated 'No U's'.

In fact, I think it's fair to say, that you're just damaging your brand name now every time you put fingers to the keyboard @Jaunt .

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

There's so much retardery in this little chunk of your reply that it's difficult to know how to respond to it. I'll try.

Yep. We're the hyper aggressive ones. It's in no way a response to the tone in which we're approached.

More likely is that you're incapable of, or unwilling to apply, objectivity and actually reading the curve of this discussion with a critical eye.

Why should I be polite to people who are slinging around insults and acting like internet bullies? Go fuck yourself. I'm going to treat you the way you treat me. It's not rocket science.

Standing up for ourselves and trying to engage with the handful of folks who are actually polite towards us isn't damaging our brand in any sort of way that we actually care about. If we gained new members by bending over and letting you shit on us, they wouldn't be joining OR for the reasons that I'd want them to.
I don't give a fuck about the MUD vs MUSH debate. You do. I get it. I think it's archaic, I think it's novice, I think the 20 year on-going argument is hurtful to the entire text-based online gaming community.

The engine doesn't matter. No other gaming genre defines itself by its engine. It defines itself by what type of game it is. The engine isn't what makes or breaks a game.

And beyond that, neither acronyms would ever be appealing to new players unfamiliar with us -- not at large. They are both terrible names.

That's why we don't care about the engine at OR. Our criteria is design-based. You want this to be some sort of MUSH vs MUD war ... but it's just not for us.

Groth

@Lithium said:

My experience is vastly different than your own.

I've seen people pk'd and permadeath applied a fair few times.

There are games that are consent based, but MUD's for the most part, you die, you might lose your gear you had on you if you can't get to your corpse, but you just respawn. Nothing permanent about that at all.

EDIT: Also, I think it's fair to say that in today's climate, we're moving towards: Player Death is the END of a story and not conducive to MORE story, which is what most people want. That's why there is 'hoops' on some games to avoid player death. Me, personally, think that death should be a part of the story and character creation should be easy, but I think that's a topic for another thread.

I see no problem with derailing this thread.

Oh, I've watched a lot of characters die. I was actually the first person to PK another character on RFK (All previous character deaths had been suicide by plot). However there are good reasons to have hoops to jump through before character deaths on MUSH regardless of how easy you make the chargen because

Everyone wants the end of their character to be a satisfying story. Someone randomly deciding to stab your character to death isn't particularly interesting so most people consider it worthwhile to ensure that deaths are always part of a decent story of some sort.
Even disregarding any mechanical parts of chargen, it's still painful to come up with a new concept, name, personality etc and potentially draining to try to build a new set of relationships from scratch. It's not something I'd like to do often atleast.

Thenomain

@Jaunt said:

At least @thenomain finally admitted that he was wrong in regards to his statistics after a few posts.

I would like to note that the only reason I did so was because I was shown. When @crayon simply said I was an idiot, I did not say a damn thing.

I mean, because I honestly didn't know, but man I treated him like he was being a dick. Y'know, because he was. Then he wasn't and he was not a dick about correcting me, and I apologized for being wrong and exploding (and being a dick myself) about it.

Something for you to think about.

Dick.

Jaunt

@Thenomain

Eh. You're right.

You weren't a very good example for me to use.

As far as being a dick ... well, I don't actively care. I'm not a dick, generally. I'm a rather nice guy.

I'll be a dick here, though, so long as people are going to approach me with vitriol and insults. It's a purposefully ironic choice. Maybe it's not an effective choice? In either case, I've sort of already committed to it.

That said, we were doing pretty well for a couple of days here, until people starting shouting at us to leave their corner of the internet -- as though they were entitled to such a thing.

In all honesty, I'd much prefer less aggressive discussion. I'm just not going to be the one to turn the other cheek.

Groth

@Jaunt said:

I'm a rather nice guy.

I think we're done here folks.

Jaunt

@Groth

You like role playing games (I assume!)

I imagine that you understand the concept of playing a character.

Let's not assume that you actually know me in a truly significant way. Just like I don't assume that you want to.

Lithium

Oi fucking vey, you say /I/ am the one being retarded? You build straw men based on taking shit completely out of context and then try to twist it to what you fucking want. Alright, let's go point by point here:

@Jaunt said:

@lithium and @il-volpe

At least @thenomain finally admitted that he was wrong in regards to his statistics after a few posts. You continue to make assertions without even taking a look around the OR website.

http://optionalrealities.com/partnership-criteria/

That's new, as of a few days ago, and was what I referenced in terms of changes we've made. Not that actual logic seems to mean much to you. You'd rather just speak on everyone's behalf and try to bully us off your site. Not gonna happen.

As far as the front page revision, I've already written it and sent it to the site's graphic designer. It'll be changed in the next few days, as soon as she sends the pertinent images back to me.

I took the revision effort upon myself, even though that's not really my job, because I agreed with points made by this community.

Unfortunately, it seems as though those criticisms weren't really about actually inspiring change, because as soon as we came to a sort of consensus on the criticisms with the site, you started resorting to shouting at us to leave your community.

Get over yourself.

Maybe you've changed stuff, maybe you haven't, I'm of the opinion that put up or shut up comes to mind and I have yet to see anything change. Sure, you put things in for revision. Sure you did. It's @Jeshin's baby but you did it. I'm sure your writing is going to clear up everything! Praise Allah!

So, in short, you were wrong, though I suspect that you don't actually care about being right.

I'm also not wrong, because what you linked, WASN'T WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT.

@lithium said:

Like @Thenomain said this stopped being a worthy thread for /anything/ a long time ago, especially since you OR admins still refuse to meaningfully engage, instead spitting out piss, vitriol, and unsubstantiated 'No U's'.

In fact, I think it's fair to say, that you're just damaging your brand name now every time you put fingers to the keyboard @Jaunt .

P.S. Your fascination on permadeath... I'm willing to bet there's a TON more games running MUSH that feature permadeath than MUD's.

There's so much retardery in this little chunk of your reply that it's difficult to know how to respond to it. I'll try.

Yep. We're the hyper aggressive ones. It's in no way a response to the tone in which we're approached.

More likely is that you're incapable of, or unwilling to apply, objectivity and actually reading the curve of this discussion with a critical eye.

Why should I be polite to people who are slinging around insults and acting like internet bullies? Go fuck yourself. I'm going to treat you the way you treat me. It's not rocket science.

The fact that after all this time you cannot see the very posts and tone that pissed so many of us off just points out the fairly obvious fact that you have some serious issues with reading comprehension, if everything else didn't already point out the fact that you have issues with reading comprehension.

In fact, my only beef with the whole immense topic was that @Jeshin still starts everything with 'Hey,' like he is some sort of spambot. It's annoying. It's like he's talking down to everyone because 'Hey' isn't used that way in common parlance. At least not where I am from. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't rightly know, I know it is the source of friction for me.

My second beef was the fact that you ALREADY POSTED YOUR ADVERTISEMENT. We don't need constant spam from @crayon about articles of whatever quality you guys think is important. If we wanted to read them, WE WOULD ALREADY BE THERE BY THIS POINT.

That's what ALL of you OR people fail to understand. You are oversaturating, and it is pissing people off. The fact that you continue to do so, and then claim ignorance as to why people are pissed off is moronic at best.

Standing up for ourselves and trying to engage with the handful of folks who are actually polite towards us isn't damaging our brand in any sort of way that we actually care about. If we gained new members by bending over and letting you shit on us, they wouldn't be joining OR for the reasons that I'd want them to.

You're not standing up for yourselves, you're digging your hole deeper. You will NEVER get what you are looking for out of us at this point. What you have gotten up to this point, is all you're going to get. It's not like MUSoapBox advertises all over. We're word of mouth.

I don't give a fuck about the MUD vs MUSH debate. You do. I get it. I think it's archaic, I think it's novice, I think the 20 year on-going argument is hurtful to the entire text-based online gaming community.

The engine doesn't matter. No other gaming genre defines itself by its engine. It defines itself by what type of game it is. The engine isn't what makes or breaks a game.

And beyond that, neither acronyms would ever be appealing to new players unfamiliar with us -- not at large. They are both terrible names.

That's why we don't care about the engine at OR. Our criteria is design-based. You want this to be some sort of MUSH vs MUD war ... but it's just not for us.

I don't give a rats ass about the Mud vs MUSH debate either, so...

You're wrong, but I don't think you care about being right.

My whole point is that the pool of people you're 'advertising' to here is LIMITED. There's not a metric ton of us. And you fail to understand (Like many religions) that if you have already converted those who are willing to be converted, by CONTINUING to try to force conversion (With your incessant fucking spam) all you'll do is incite jyhad.

Peace.

Mush vs Mud, heh...

Thenomain

@Jaunt said:

Yes, I'm a dick.

I think we can agree on this, yes.

I've sort of already committed to it.

You be you.

TNP

@Jaunt said:

I'll be a dick here, though, so long as people are going to approach me with vitriol and insults. It's a purposefully ironic choice. Maybe it's not an effective choice? In either case, I've sort of already committed to it.

And if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?

Christ. You're not just a dick, you're an immature ten year old. What a wonderful representative for your site.

Autumn

The problem with being a dick because other people are being a dick to you is that you'll also end up turning off people who aren't being a dick to you. Which ... I mean, maybe this is just me, but if I were hoping to attract some of the lurkers and infrequent posters to the site I'm advertising, that's a thing I'd try to avoid

Jaunt

@Lithium said:

The fact that after all this time you cannot see the very posts and tone that pissed so many of us off just points out the fairly obvious fact that you have some serious issues with reading comprehension, if everything else didn't already point out the fact that you have issues with reading comprehension.

Yeah ... I don't have a problem with comprehension, though. The only reason I came here was because of how shitty you guys were being on this thread. You can try to re-write history if you'd like, but it's not a particularly compelling argument.

@Lithium said:

You build straw men based on taking shit completely out of context

I'd love for you to quote my straw-man argument. I don't mind admitting when I'm wrong. I suspect that you thinking I took something "out of context" has more to do with you presenting your ideas vaguely, but it's hard to say without knowing what exactly you're talking about.

@Lithium said:

Maybe you've changed stuff, maybe you haven't, I'm of the opinion that put up or shut up comes to mind and I have yet to see anything change. Sure, you put things in for revision. Sure you did. It's @Jeshin's baby but you did it. I'm sure your writing is going to clear up everything! Praise Allah!

Again, this is more of the unproductive bullshit that brought me here in the first place. Do you have a reason not to believe me, other than the fact that I've pissed you off in a general way? No. You're just trolling. If your goal is to encourage us to be less active on "your site" (it's yours, right?) so that this thread isn't always popping up in your news feed, I promise you that trolling is not the way to go about it.

@Lithium said:

I'm also not wrong, because what you linked, WASN'T WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT.

Try using your words, then. Like, words that actually explain what it is you're talking about in a way that makes it possible to respond to you in a meaningful way.

@Lithium said:

In fact, my only beef with the whole immense topic was that @Jeshin still starts everything with 'Hey,' like he is some sort of spambot. It's annoying. It's like he's talking down to everyone because 'Hey' isn't used that way in common parlance. At least not where I am from. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't rightly know, I know it is the source of friction for me.

Yeah, I think it's a weird habit too. But I'm also not petty enough to hate on someone because they have a tendency to start their sentences with the word 'hey'. Seems like a waste of your energy to me.

@Lithium said:

My second beef was the fact that you ALREADY POSTED YOUR ADVERTISEMENT. We don't need constant spam from @crayon about articles of whatever quality you guys think is important. If we wanted to read them, WE WOULD ALREADY BE THERE BY THIS POINT.

That's what ALL of you OR people fail to understand. You are oversaturating, and it is pissing people off. The fact that you continue to do so, and then claim ignorance as to why people are pissed off is moronic at best.

Your only beef, except your second beef?

We post an update, what, once a week? Once every two weeks? It's pretty non-intrusive, too. It just says, "Hey, here's what is going on at OR if you're interested."

We do this on many community sites. Some of them aren't even dedicated to text-based games at all. Nobody else has complained. In fact, this is the only site that we've experienced conflict on. Nobody's been shitty to us elsewhere.

Why do you think that is?

Sure, this thread's over-saturating this site right now. I'm not ignorant of that at all. You can't possibly act like that's all on us. You keep posting here, too.

@Lithium said:

You're not standing up for yourselves, you're digging your hole deeper. You will NEVER get what you are looking for out of us at this point. What you have gotten up to this point, is all you're going to get. It's not like MUSoapBox advertises all over. We're word of mouth.

You can keep on asserting that you speak for everyone on this site. It doesn't mean that I'm going to believe you.

We've had a handful of great, albeit brief, conversations on this thread with people who are approaching us in a thoughtful way. I've found value in that dialogue. You're completely discounting those folks and those conversations, because you personally want to push us away.

As I've said before, that's not going to happen. You can continue to try, but it'll actually have the opposite effect of what you're hoping to accomplish.

@Thenomain said:

Yes, I pretend to want to engage in meaningful dialogue, but I'm actually a manipulative troll who incites other trolls by way of my awesome internet status.

I guess we can both read between the lines.

Which one of us is right? Neither of us? Both of us?

Groth

@Jaunt said:

We post an update, what, once a week? Once every two weeks? It's pretty non-intrusive, too. It just says, "Hey, here's what is going on at OR if you're interested."

On this particular point, I'm actually with @Jaunt. It's very easy to avoid this thread if you don't want to be in it, until today I had actually never opened this thread before because I couldn't care less and it was only until I saw the thread that @Thenomain split off to discuss MUSH philosophy that I got interested in investigating the source.

Yes this thread will show up among your unread threads however you don't have to read all your unread threads, you really don't.

Lithium

@Jaunt

...

Wow. You prove that you can't comprehend again. I never said that I spoke for everyone. I said that /many/ are feeling a certain way. I don't need to speak for everyone on that, everyone has already spoken.

The straw man was you linking something completely unrelated to my point, which was that you guys came here, spam the shit out of us, and then get all self-righteous when we get annoyed about it.

You get even more self-righteous when we don't agree with you.

Amazingly, you get even more when we tell you exactly how/why we feel something, and then come back with childish 'No U' responses.

As for why I don't believe you?

It's not your site. I have yet to see any changes. People talk a lot. People lie. People try to placate other people. Actions speak louder than words, and until there is verifiable proof that anything /has/ been changed, you're just spewing nonsense.

Considering you came here with the intention of trying to out troll us, you'll have to excuse me (or not, I don't really care) if I don't believe you at all.

You're attempting to troll me isn't working out because:

I used the term 'was'. I only had one beef, until another thing happened, thus was. Past tense. I clearly have more than one beef now.

Again, reading comprehension is not your strong suit.

The fact that you have experienced conflict over here hasn't educated you to the fact that maybe you've missed the mark when it comes to approaching this corner of our community? Not even the slightest hint that it was unwelcome? All this nastyness directed your way, and your response is:

Let's throw gasoline on the fire.

Then you wonder why it's gotten even further out of hand.

I post because I feel things need to be said, that my 'voice' as it were, needs to weigh in for whatever value that has, probably none at all, but if by continuing to point out all the ways you fail, in my opinion, I can do my own little part well then I am going to do it.

Thenomain

@Jaunt said:

I could be a nice guy, I just don't want to.

Don't you ever change.

@Groth said:

It's very easy to avoid this thread if you don't want to be in it.

There is an 'ignore user' plugin available, too, but I doubt we'll use it. It would be nice if a future version of NodeBB included an 'ignore' option as one of the thread watch/unwatch toggles, but we'll see.

Jaunt

@Autumn said:

The problem with being a dick because other people are being a dick to you is that you'll also end up turning off people who aren't being a dick to you. Which ... I mean, maybe this is just me, but if I were hoping to attract some of the lurkers and infrequent posters to the site I'm advertising, that's a thing I'd try to avoid

I think this is a pretty good point. Let me ask you what you would suggest, being more familiar with the members of this community than I am.

This was my personal perspective. When dealing with bullies, you can:

Run away.
Let them beat the shit out of you, and then go about your life.
Fight back.

My perception is that the conversation had turned towards bullying Jeshin before I started posting. However effective or ineffective my choice on how to deal with this thread has been, the catalyst for it was an inherent distaste for the sort of behavior that I read on this thread, and a desire to stick up for a co-worker who really didn't deserve the bullshit that he was getting.