Posts made by Alzie

Okay, I am tired but I suppose people will find a reason to get upset about anything.

@Tempest Said:

I got pseudo "uninvited" for bitching about stuff on WORA early last year and my character was killed off screen according to the wiki.

Nobody gets uninvited or asked to leave due to WORA. So you can stop on that note. As for your character getting killed off, while I'm not sure who you played, if you were gone for a year, then it's pretty clear you're not coming back.

@Tempest Said:

ETA : No way is randomly killing Player Characters off-screen with vague shit like "killed by something?" not done out of OOC spite for one reason or another, even if it is just 'fuck this asshole for disappearing'. Use NPCs for your fucking "plot".

So, let's be clear. We moved wikis. That being said, the old one is at http://requiemforkingsmouth.wikia.com/wiki/Requiem_for_Kingsmouth_Wiki . So keep that in mind when you look at the new wiki for dates. As to the 'killed by something' line. There is not a single person on this list http://kingsmouth.info/wiki/Deceased that does not have a specific method of death. So I have no idea what you're even talking about.

@Misadventure said:

Staff set idle out time. They decide that is a freeze equal to abandonment., THAT may be (to me it is) poor policy

We do not equate time out to abandonment. We do equate being gone for several months or a year with no contact to abandonment. As would anyone else, so none of you start.

@Derp said:

Killing a PC is the absolute laziest and most unfair method of going about something. If the goal is to fix people sitting on territory or whatever, then it's pretty easy to say that they abandoned it, for whatever reason.

That is not the goal..

Now that all the rhetoric is addressed, actual explanations. The policy exists because while on the reach if you freezered six times in one day you never bothered anyone or anything. On our game, if you freezer six times in one day you cause us work and affect the political landscape. Anyone that plays on our game should know that the inactivity policy exists first and foremost as a way to buffer the monthly eminence and influence rankings from being inflated by people that don't actually play the game. This has so far been a successful deterrent to people having their friends make point mules. Additionally, having players show up that are 3 weeks idle affects our census and we feel that it is a lie to tell you there are 3 gangrel when one of them hasn't bothered to log in for 3 weeks.

Now, as for killing PCs off in plot. If you care to go investigate the PCs killed off in plot, they were either inactive for a long time (Several months to a year) or we were told they were not coming back. We also don't do this just randomly out of spite. We only do this in relation to a plot, we also sometimes use them as plot NPCs. This is a better use of existing resources that someone has just abandoned than just letting them sit there. If you don't like that, then make it clear where you're going when you decide you no longer want to play at Kingsmouth. The reason we do this is because there are no random NPC vampires in kingsmouth. Every vampire in kingsmouth is a defined entity. We have no shadow entities, no 'this random daeva,' no 'that guy.' They all have names. So when a player has been gone 7 months and we need a female daeva for a plot and that player hasn't contacted us in 7 months, yeah we will use that player as our NPC. And why not? I don't think that's unreasonable to assume if you can't bother yourself to tell someone in several months that you're busy but want to retain the PC that you are not coming back. Writing an email takes exactly 3 seconds. All it needs is 'I play x. RL.' We will understand this.

@Crayon said:

Jeshin writes on where text-based games fit into the bigger picture of gaming, and the powers of text as a gaming medium!
http://optionalrealities.com/the-text-based-rpg-unlimited-potential/

Suggestion: Proofread. The mismatched tenses, ambiguous sentences, bad direct objects and mismatched pluralities make me cringe.

As to the individual points.

@Jeshin said:

First, we must understand that text-based games are very retro, and gaming has progressed past us on most technical levels.

All evidence to the contrary, given the popularity of things like minecraft and the various choose your own adventure novels on steam. People don't care that they're retro, people care that they're fun. Visual Novels are a thing. They're a huge thing;They make a shit ton of money. Text is not the issue.

@Jeshin said:

Then, we have to consider that the majority of our community of developers are made up of volunteer hobbyists, because of the restrictive nature of the licenses that our game engines use...[more stuff]...Something something can't make money.

Okay, I'll bite. Even if this were true (it's not), since when has a restrictive license stopped anyone from coding anything? I'll give you a hint, it hasn't. Sourceforge and Github are two sites that amount for the biggest share of that work, work that is done on code that is released for free to others. Some of the projects on github and sourceforge people make money on. Just because you have released the source or licensed it under one of the common open source licenses does not mean you can't make money on what you made. Consequently, it holds true that others can also make money on it depending on the license.

However, I expect you'll have some counter argument that doesn't actually address this and point to code bases. Okay, I'll tackle that too.

Pennmush is licensed under the artistic license. All the code that they came from is also licensed under that license. That license explicitly states you can make money on the thing that is being licensed. So if someone wanted to - which they don't - they could make money off pennmush.

Tinymux doesn't have a license included in their source.

As to muds, the rapture engine is what iron realms uses, it's open source (now anyways) but they make money off of it.

Technically every derivative of dikumud is breaking the copyright. Reason? The original copyright, the one with the program, requires you to notify the creators anytime you use or modify the code or hell, even run your own diku mud. It also requires you to list their names on the login screen and make sure that there is always a credits command that lists their names. Is anyone getting sued? No. They have no intention of enforcing their copyright. I'm not even entirely sure these people are still alive.

That being said.
Statement: All our coders are hobbyists.
Rebuttal: Patently false. See Iron Realms. Also, just because someone contributes to the free software community doesn't mean they aren't also working in a field that requires programming. See Linus Torvalds or Bjarne Stroustrup.

Statement: You can't make money on mu's!
Rebuttal: Patently false. Artistic license explicitly states you can.
Second Rebuttal: Also patently false because Diku isn't the only mud codebase. See List of Code Bases. See all those marked GPL for instance? You can make money off those.

Why are you so focused on diku? Lord.

@jeshin said:

We're bad at advertising.

Did you know a mud once advertised in PC Gamer magazine? Do you know why they stopped? Not because of money, but because it didn't actually work. The ad wasn't bad. We're bad at advertising because we stick to our known communities. We stick to our known communities because the belief is that we won't be accepted. Perhaps we don't advertise because we're happy with the status quo. Perhaps then we're not bad at advertising, it's just that we don't want to advertise.

Rather then, the issue is that people are happy where they are. Mudconnect and Mudstats are things. That's enough. It's not as if we don't have a reddit, which we do for the record. How many people advertise their games there? Basically 0.

TLDR: Bad? No. We just don't do it.

@jeshin said:

We need to be writing press releases.

Bonus Comment: I will patiently await for you or anyone to get one written and published.

I'll be fair, the following is a paraphrase.
@jeshin said:

The best way to keep people interested in your game is to have them play something that isn't your game as a community..

Yes, this makes total sense. The best way to make people want to continue to play my Mu is to act as the staging point for a massive league of legends gaming group. Sweet. This isn't to say that the community shouldn't do things as a group, but if the only reason people log in is to coordinate outside activities, you need to re-evaluate your game.

Point: You wrote an entire article telling us what we do wrong and then contradicted yourself entirely at the end by going 'oh but, actually, there are games that already do all this, did I mention those?'

Edit: After thinking a bit, I want to say that mud that advertised in PC Gamer was medievia.

@crayon I guess I should be blunt: People are lazy. A fact which, even without me saying it in direct terms, you have so far given plenty of evidence for.

@silentsophia I'm assuming you mean for Crunchyroll? Just to clarify for those who may not know what Premium+ refers to.

@crayon So, because work would be required, nothing is done. Which is consistent with the real reason that we both seem to know but won't say.

@jeshin You say that as if it's a bad thing, as if you have some inherent right to carry something over from your last character on death. Though I know where the thought process stems from, but not all muds ascribe to it.

Overall though, while it's okay to explain a concept for the benefit of those that may not understand it, outright making the claim that everyone in a particular community doesn't understand a concept is a sure fire way to alienate the community. Which you did. From experience, the Mud community is very elitist, claiming they are 'the foundation' and 'genesis.' Terms actually employed I might add by most mud coders and users. In fact, you have, in this thread, referred to Muds as the progenitors of the mush already. Still in keeping with the pattern.

I understand muds. I maintain two custom codebases that I modify for shits and giggles when I'm bored.
SWFote - Sagas
SWR - Some Name Later

So really, You can drop the elitism and superiority. Yeah, I do know, probably better than you think.

@Thenomain To explain Crayon, It boils down to the fact that Muds use flatfiles for each character. These flatfiles determine what names are taken as well. Coding death in requires deciding how to deal with these flatfiles and/or whether or not you allow names to be reused. Real permadeath would mean a system that closes a connection, ends the flatfile, deletes/moves it somewhere and then, if wanted, pings a system to make sure the name can't be used again. All of this in poorly documented, error prone, badly written hardcode (usually c, because when the mud codebases were written, despite the availability of better choices, c was apparently the shit) that makes even me want to stab my eyes out when I look at it.

So basically: It is not easy to change mud hardcode.

@Misadventure said:

RPI is the term for a heavily automated (code moderated) text game that purposefully includes roleplay.

If you aren't self-designating as an RPI, then you likely aren't one, and have no interest ion being on this list?

It's not adjectives, it's terminology.

I know, RolePlay Enforced (though why that was shortened to RPI who knows) Mud. Muds feature automated systems. In the context of a mud, I could have defined Automated System by myself in a second. However, if your goal is to collect RPIs, but you turn around and say that automated systems aren't important to your goal, there's a disconnect somewhere. That was the point I was trying to make.

@Jeshin Then maybe the goal should be to collect Roleplay Enforced Mu's? You don't seem too held up on the RPI term and Crayon has stated that automated systems are unimportant. At this point you have so far stated that RPI games are not intrinsic to the goal of your project.

@crayon said:

@Alzie said:

So again, the definition appears to be any command that a player types which then produces an output. So either we're not as stupid as you want us to be or you're not as smart as you think you are.

[Other Stuff]

Most nonconsent MUShes, and several MUSHes in general, probably qualify. While their automated systems are more Risk and less, say, Crusader Kings 2 or Civilization V, usually, they're still automated systems.

Okay...So, both the Risk and Crusader Kings of our example would qualify. That took 240 responses to get.

@crayon said:

I'm really not sure where all the talk of snobbishness, nepotism, elitism and the like came from, but for all of the complaining about our requirements, I don't believe anybody's actually applied and been rejected.

Areeee you suuuureeee? I can remind youuuuu.

@crayon said earlier:

There's a lot of hostility, chest-beating, and elitism going around, and it really turns me off from wanting to try to engage with anybody here, because people only seem to be interested in debating with straw men.

Generally speaking, the tone of debate here has seemed on the combative side, and I'm not really one to flinch away from debate or being combative in it, so if that's off-putting, I'm sorry, but when somebody repeatedly torches the same strawmen or spears the same windmill forty consecutive times and then starts calling people stupid, I'm perfectly capable of pointing out the fallacy.

I don't think we're combative. I just don't think you were prepared for a community that would challenge your vague ideas. This is such a community. A lot of us have been in this a long time. Nobody here wants you to fail, but nobody here wants to hear your bullshit either. We've already heard it a million times before.

The automated systems requirement has less to do with 'roleplaying' and more to do with 'game', specifically different classes of and approaches to design.

I guess i'm confused. If your mission is to collect good RPI's, then why create a criteria that has nothing at all to do with roleplaying. Those are your words now, not mine. That seems entirely counter productive if not even you can tell me that Automated Systems have anything to do with Roleplaying (Which is what most of us have been saying for 13 pages).

@crayon said:

I think you'll find that 'automated systems' is a very simplistic and minor requirement. While the degree of automation required can be construed as vague, having automation at all is pretty simple.

Golly gee guys, why are you so stupid? This is a simple concept.

@crayon Said:

Is it anything-goes, may as well be roleplaying in a Yahoo chatroom for all intents and purposes? Probably not sufficiently automated. Do you have automated systems that generate outcomes rather than leaving it up to the player or some sort of arbitration? You probably qualify.

So again, the definition appears to be any command that a player types which then produces an output. So either we're not as stupid as you want us to be or you're not as smart as you think you are.

On another note, it always warms the nether regions when someone gets their panties in a twist because you're asking them to define something in their pretend fun time project and they resort to insults and intelligence comparisons because they have no legitimate answer.

@crayon Said:

There's a lot of hostility, chest-beating, and elitism going around, and it really turns me off from wanting to try to engage with anybody here, because people only seem to be interested in debating with straw men.

@Jeshin Perhaps it hasn't been an issue, but Perhaps you never came to a community purporting to be an independent Mu listing that wanted to list any game that met certain criteria. Then when that community expressed that your criteria were vague at best, you responded by saying that the criteria are vague on purpose because you do not in fact want to be an independent Mu listing that lists any game that meets certain criteria.

Perhaps you should just be honest about what you are. Perhaps you should just say: We talk about Mu things and perhaps, if you ask, we'll list your game as an example of what we consider a good game.

@Jeshin Then perhaps you need to actually define automated systems beyond 'Whatever I want it to mean at any given point in time.'

@jeshin So you didn't actually provide a definition of automated system, but it seems to be any command that performs some action and gives some output. If that's the case, then every game in existence qualifies for your list.

I am not on mux so can't help too much, but can you possibly provide debug spam? I would be happy to look through it and pinpoint issues.

Perhaps use gist

@Tempest The keyword is not starting things. Civilians are protected, but they're expected to not pursue aggressive actions and as long as they do that nothing will happen and alternatives will always be pursued. That being said, There isn't a 100% guarantee that being civilian means you won't die because of that expectation of not pursuing aggressive actions.

Also, you're looking for support. Civilian -> Support -> Political.

@Jeshin
Requiem for Kingsmouth
Automated Systems: Boons, Daily Waking Vitae (Ability to modify this to include extra things you pay for), Feeding, Monthly Resources, XP Spends, Character Generation (but not approval), Hunting, Rolling Dice (Pulling from sheet stats), Wielding Items, Wearing Armor, Modifying Initiative Scores, Rolling Initiatives, Ticketing System, Ritual Tracker, +OSS Automates Patrols, Automated Territory Investigations, +OSS Automates Coverups, Automated Lacrima deposits based on Garden Attributes, Hunger Prompts, Automated Torpor upon not feeding, Damage, Healing, Willpower Recovery, I can keep going but will not

Roleplay Centric: The only rooms we have are IC ones and if you're on the gird you are on the grid and roleplaying

Perma-Death: We are 100% non-consent, but we have a civilian status that guarantees you the discussion of alternatives but not the guarantee of something not happening

Seriously, What the hell are muds doing now-a-days? My mush has more automated systems than all of those you listed. Shamefur dispray.

@Jeshin said:

Well technically

@Thenomain You mean turning numbers into random names isn't informative? You don't say.

@Rook: A truly granular permissions system like you want would probably be hell to code without a DB but not impossible. However, given the average person who would end up using the system, I find myself wondering if anyone else would want it. Coders would, but not all games have them (in fact, it's becoming more common for games not to have coders and rely on those of us in the wild to make their code).

History is an implied feature. As for groups, Groups can be made, but see above. Making simple groups that represent groups of dbrefs though would be simple. Could probably even allow people to make search queries for them.

So yeah, Remember that promise I made you? Well I'm starting on it in my freetime since I finished porting sheets over on RFK. That being said, here is the Github wiki where I'm listing out what I plan to do.

https://github.com/ccubed/MuReq/wiki

Does anyone have any comments on what's there or want something added?

On pennmush, separating out Commands, Functions, Data and Displays is even easier thanks to Attribute trees. It's one of the things I like about pennmush. Mux is very annoying in that respect, because seeing a giant list of attributes isn't useful to anyone, Pennmush actually formatting it in a tree is useful Also, lattr respecting the levels is even better. That being said, attribute trees in pennmush are easily the most misunderstood thing that new coders encounter and that ultimately breaks their code when they first get started, especially if they're used to mux's version of lattr.