Attachment to old-school MU* clients

[Kestrel]

I've seen several attempts over recent years to try and innovate and improve on the old-school approach to text-based RPGs. Moving past the idea of building a game you connect to via a telnet client, with some examples being optional web-based integration or a purely web-based experience.

The thing I've noticed playing AresMUSH games is that a lot of people still choose to use their old-school MU* client even when the option to play exclusively using the website exists. I wonder what possible reasons there are for this.

As a community, are we emotionally attached to old-school technology? Comfortable and nostalgic? Or is there something that this experience provides that more modern approaches can't?

[Devrex]

@kestrel There's a few commands that only work on client, and...well. The much bigger flashy thing helps me know when it's time to check the web portal. The portal is about 500% easier on my eyes, but I tend to have...a whole lot of windows and tabs and things open because ADHD and so even with the favicons it's helpful to have the big blinky thing. Also some games have better, more obvious, more readable favicons than others. And so I've come to rely on the hybrid approach...even though for awhile there I was exclusively portal.

[Carma]

This post is deleted!

[Ganymede]

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

As a community, are we emotionally attached to old-school technology?

That would explain why I am a moderator here.

Comfortable and nostalgic?

That would contradict why I am a moderator here.

Or is there something that this experience provides that more modern approaches can't?

Not really.

[Pyrephox]

While I am ALL IN on the web-based evolution of play, and haven't been able to manage to stick to a game that requires a client in years, the things I hear from people suggest that there is still a lot that clients provide.

Ability to split off streams of information, for one. I know you can sort of do it in Ares with different tabs, but I know some people have custom setups that kick, like, /these/ specific channels over to this window, and pages and secret org channels to THAT window, and then poses to a third window, and web-based things that I've seen aren't that flexible, yet.

Macros and custom code, and softcode that works from client-side, for another.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

I'm sure attachment is a large part of it, but the client still has features the browser doesn't for me, like spawns to make dealing with multiple channels easier and RP while doing so, dual-input windows so I can save a pose while doing something else like paging in another one, etc. I use Beip, it's nice. I do most of my posing on the web portal and all my forum interaction there, but it's not my favorite way to engage with everything else. Getting closer to it every day, though. The web portal's already leaps and bounds better to play exclusively on than it was a couple years ago.

ETA: I'm also a Firefox user and the Ares web portal at this point just works better in Chrome, so playing exclusively on the portal right now means either a (slight, but still present) decrease in how well it works or using a browser I typically don't, which comes with a loss of some of other pros of playing in-browser. This is one of those things I expect to change as Ares evolves, though.

[Roz]

@kestrel The short answer? My client still provides certain levels of functionality that Ares doesn't. I'm someone who is generally not particularly resistant to change, I love technology and exploring new tools and whatnot. The Ares web portal most definitely makes some significant improvements in the experience, and I've been a cheerleader for it since early on.

Is it possible that someday a web portal like Ares might make so many improvements that the things I get out of Atlantis become entirely redundant? I suppose so. But right now there is still significant functionality that I have come to rely upon for my play experience that isn't available in the web portal.

Granted, the bulk of my RP over the past 5-6 years has been on Arx, which isn't on Ares. Evennia does have a web client, and some improvements have been made to it over that time, but it's nowhere near the functionality of either the Ares web portal or my MU* client (Atlantis).

But generally, clients generally come with more customization tools to tailor the client to the user's preferences. I think the idea that people are just resistant to change is a much smaller part of this than just that people want to be able to engage in a way that's unique to them, and that the client provides that functionality.

[Sunny]

I use a modern client (BeipMu) so I can't say I'm attached to old-school clients, but I still use a client at all because the only place I play isn't Ares and doesn't have everything I need on the web. When I was playing on games that had everything web accessible, I still used a client because one of my games needed it, and I was not about to have two programs open.

[Sunny]

ALSO

blinky blinky flashy flashy is super important to remind me I'm RPing.

[faraday]

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

ALSO
blinky blinky flashy flashy is super important to remind me I'm RPing.

Yeah. I can't use the web play screen for the same reason I can't use the web versions of discord or slack or verizon tech support. The notifications just aren't attention-grabbing enough in a browser so I'll forget it's there.

We should also keep in mind that the need for some kind of desktop client doesn't mean that we should be stuck with telnet-driven plain text blobs forever. It's just all we have currently.

In terms of features not being available on web, I think a lot of it is just habit/tradition.

For example, consider spawns. Without them on a regular client, everything is jumbled up in one thread. That makes spawns essential, which trains our brains to interact with the game in a certain way. But we don't have spawns in discord, and nobody(*) cares because they're not necessary. Everything is already separated enough.

(*) - I'm sure somebody somewhere cares, but generally it's not a thing people worry about.

Auto-logging is similar. A browser app will never log the same as a desktop app. For somebody who's used to logging every piece of screen text every time they log in, that could bug them But for someone who starts out with Ares... they know they can report a conversation/scene for abuse easily, can download any scene when it's done, and can get an archive of the entire portal on demand. Do they really need live-to-disk-pose-by-pose logging? Probably not.

Challenging the status quo requires looking beyond what current features are available (spawns, logging) to what need those features are meeting. If you can meet that need in a different way, it may not be enough to convince people who have been doing things a certain way for 30 years, but it can begin to shift the paradigm.

[Roz]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

For example, consider spawns. Without them on a regular client, everything is jumbled up in one thread. That makes spawns essential, which trains our brains to interact with the game in a certain way. But we don't have spawns in discord, and nobody(*) cares because they're not necessary. Everything is already separated enough.

I would actually say that Discord's not a great comparison here, because Discord servers absolutely make use of channels, which are, from my perspective, the same exact thing as spawns. I can't speak to RP servers on Discord, because I haven't tried them, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have IC and OOC specific channels and whatnot. All the Discord servers I'm on have channels to organize conversation.

[faraday]

@roz said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I would actually say that Discord's not a great comparison here, because Discord servers absolutely make use of channels, which are, from my perspective, the same exact thing as spawns.

But that's exactly my point. There is a natural visual separation of the data that makes "spawns" in the sense of separate tabbed windows irrelevant.

The Ares web play screen works the same way. (I'm not saying it has 100% feature parity with Discord or that it's perfectly designed in its current form, just that philosophically it's closer than the old MU client model.)

[Roz]

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@roz said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I would actually say that Discord's not a great comparison here, because Discord servers absolutely make use of channels, which are, from my perspective, the same exact thing as spawns.

But that's exactly my point. There is a natural visual separation of the data that makes "spawns" in the sense of separate tabbed windows irrelevant.

The Ares web play screen works the same way. (I'm not saying it has 100% feature parity with Discord or that it's perfectly designed in its current form, just that philosophically it's closer than the old MU client model.)

Ah! Yeah, that makes sense.

[Kestrel]

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

ALSO

blinky blinky flashy flashy is super important to remind me I'm RPing.

IIRC Ares sends desktop notifications, at least on Chrome. Is there a difference here still?

I wonder if a mobile app with push notifications could make a difference, too.

[GreenFlashlight]

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

The thing I've noticed playing AresMUSH games is that a lot of people still choose to use their old-school MU* client even when the option to play exclusively using the website exists. I wonder what possible reasons there are for this.

The web client is too likely to lose connection and/or stop sending me notifications.

[Ifrit]

I actually had a bit of fun a while back trying to see what a 'future' MU could look like - essentially going browser-only. I got fairly far in the interface before the Good Old ADHD kicked in and I got bored with the project. It still lives on my hard drive, in case I ever get bored.

It's a JS frontend with GraphQL backend, the idea being that anyone could write their own clients for it if they wanted but also that the built-in frontend should be customisable and persistent (as I basically wrote a JS window manager). Each window can have a character that's tied to your login associated to it and so on.

Of course one of the big 'failure' points for it for me is that as it's in browser you're restricted on how much flashy desktop notifications you could do which is a big thing for me as a player. While you could potentially run it in desktop mode with a technology like Electron it'd be game-locked most likely and so on.

Have a GIF to see Yet Another Project That I Started And Will Probably Never Finish.

[Kestrel]

@ifrit

[Sunny]

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

ALSO

blinky blinky flashy flashy is super important to remind me I'm RPing.

IIRC Ares sends desktop notifications, at least on Chrome. Is there a difference here still?

I wonder if a mobile app with push notifications could make a difference, too.

Whatever notifications Ares had when I was playing on an Ares game did not manage to catch my attention / keep me reminded I was RPing. If this has changed or is different now, I don't know, all I do know is that it was previously a problem for me that my client solves by flashing.

[faraday]

@greenflashlight said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

The web client is too likely to lose connection and/or stop sending me notifications.

The connection will drop on mobile when the device goes to sleep - that’s a general limitation of mobile web apps. A mobile client is really the right thing there but it’s complicated because of game variations.

There are also connection limitations by some work or school firewalls, but nothing widespread that I’m aware of.

If folks are having issues please reach out via PM or on the Ares forum or discord with more details so I can look into the problem.

[faraday]

@sunny notifications vary based on your browser, operating system, preferences, and whether the game has set up HTTPS. But FWIW I find even the best browser notification far inferior to the MU client blink. The same is true for slack and discord for me as well.