Best posts made by Apos

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yeah, I don't mean this as a slam on WoD at all, but it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it. It's significantly easier to set up a sandbox and get going there than anywhere else, along with a great many people familiar with it that are willing to pitch in.

Yeah, I'm reading this 'good games differ' line and am just baffled, given the world we all exist in. We've been getting by on plug-and-play code in large part for decades. I cannot fathom how better plug-and-play systems will be anything but a positive and open up the market for people who wouldn't have otherwise to run a good game.

Now in fairness to the quote where that came from, I am pretty sure they just meant every good owner will want to add their own things and systems if they don't want a sandbox clone. But even from that perspective, I think it's just easier to do so in a modern language, and having a baseline, out of box game that can then be modded easily is a huge help. And as systems are created, they become very portable.

Edit: @Ganymede was hitting the same point while I was posting, so I will edit to add for clarity- I believe it would be significantly easier to port systems made in ruby or python to new games, if people are willing to share code, so in theory even for someone wanting extremely complicated systems but without having the time/ability to code, there could eventually be a whole hell of a lot they could do out of the box with a bazillion potential modules/add ons.

Complete transparency of expecting people to roll with ooc knowledge in a way that doesn't effect their play works pretty much the same as pure consent games, and it's a very similar argument- 'we don't need systems to decide outcomes or arbitrate things since good roleplayers will be reasonable adults'. Keep in mind, I enjoy pure consent games, but they have a very different feel, and I think the same is true for transparency vs hidden.

I consider good players going too far and handicapping themselves as a more consistent but less noticeable problem than bad actors. The chill, reasonable people will take falls all the time to not make a fuss even when they would never need to do that if they didn't oocly know information in advance, or if dice rolls would have declared them a victor.

tbh I'm closer to @BlondeBot in thinking it is better to give specific examples, because I think 'don't be a dick' doesn't prevent as many problems as I'd like. It's helpful to give people a general feeling of the environment you are hoping to create, but relatively little of my time is spent policing really bad actors, but people that are reasonable and just disagree.

I think it's more helpful to just focus on policies that are around the kind of environment you enjoy, and there's a huge range in that. Some people really, really enjoy no holds barred, competitive environments, where ooc communication is very much like WORA. I certainly don't, but they aren't a small group in MU-dom, really. Like can you imagine a MUD like Stillborn having the same kind of civility policies as a purely collaborative, consent-based MUSH?

I think giving examples gives people a better heads up on what kind of environment you are shooting for, and whether someone will be comfortable there or stay far away. I mean if someone wants to try to appeal to everyone, can certainly give it a shot, but you'll definitely be banning people who have way different opinions on what being a dick means.

@bronn said in Armageddon MUD:

The truth is in @ShaLeah 's latest statement. The game is an exclusive club, and survival of the fittest reigns. They want players who are willing to lose while they get to have fun.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But games internal philosophies are going to wildly diverge when you have someone that's chill and wants more players to pop in and has a collaborative mindset (like @ThugHeaven probably from her posts) and then you have dudes that are clinging to an original, 'roar I survived the worst shit thrown at me and now everyone should, sink or swim newbs' competitive mindset.

So yea those two are pretty hard to reconcile, and if you're like, 'well, newbs should have to learn that like I did', that's okay, but that's definitely a competitive design choice and that is making the game way more niche and that does mean anyone with ooc knowledge of how the game works has a huge edge on someone new coming in that does have a competitive mindset. Again, if you wanna do that, it's fine if you do, but yeah of course that's going to be a huge turnoff to most people. The more game-like, mechanical aspects are going to be dominated by people that understand it the best and can use it to their advantage, which is true for every game, but if it has a more competitive bent it's going to be a whole hell of a lot less newbie friendly since unless you specifically create safeguards, you're pretty much relying on every single player to oocly play nice.

And for someone that has a more collaborative approach, working within that framework is a little swimming upstream. Sure, if a new player interacts with them personally, they'll probably have a positive first impression and be more likely to stick around, but the odds of that aren't great. Remember how the first MMOs had no tutorials? Notice how they all do now, with specifically designed newbie garden areas? Yeah. There's a reason for that, and it's not because gamers got worse. And if you are relying on people to find out things on their own and specifically limiting ooc contact in order to keep immersion, giving intuitive tools for them to do so is going to be an extremely large factor in how many stay or not. The really competitive mindsets will see that weedout as a good thing, whether you agree or not really just depends on your goals for the game.

@lotherio I think that was more because saying I mischaracterized an argument is similar to saying someone was disingenuous, so if the latter is an insult then the former would be also. I think this underscores that it is difficult to talk about this stuff in a civil way that doesn't spiral.

It is very understandable that any accusation of not doing work or that their creations are derivative is insulting and unfair. I really think that sort of thing is unnecessary and very unfair to creators, and you and Faraday in particular do tremendous work, but it is also extremely difficult to talk about any of this in a way that someone doesn't take personally.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

A list of people presently online on the game, where you can click on one and have it open a private messaging conversation to them, is arguably a lot more intuitive to everyone who uses the internet than knowing you need to 'page <blah>=<foo>'. Everyone's used to being able to do that on Discord servers already, or Battle.net, or Steam, or Skype, or IRC, or whatever.

I am 99% sure that that feature alone would make these games immediately accessible to a wider audience. Clickable tool bar to bring up a collapsible who list/friends (watch) list, clickable conversations, and so on.

Anyways.

Just do whatever helps you learn, and I think if you want to try to code something and aren't sure where to begin, it might not be a bad idea to ask here. I don't think examples of python implementations would hurt at all for anyone else trying to learn.

@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@Roz said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@Groth said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

That doesn't need to be the cost at all. Even if baronies no longer exist as organisations, you're still perfectly capable of playing a poor member of a noble family and you could still be appointed the Baron of three pig herders and a horse if you want to without that needing to be an org.

Wait, can you play a Baron without there being an actual baron-level org? Is that an actual thing? I don't know, I'm asking.

It's not an actual thing in the current structure. Groth is suggesting the structure could be changed.

Oh! That should reduce staff workload, at least. Since you're typically already in the higher-ranking orgs as well, I'm not sure what the overall effect would be besides that.

I dunno if it would reduce it. The problem with things like, "we'll just handwave it, we don't need to get the mechanical background for it" is the moment that stuff comes up, it's worse than as if we hadn't done it before and means I need to retroactively add it all or the player is just told they can't do what their character really should be able to do. It would be a lot like if someone is told they are a powerful merchant family, but we'll just handwave their income since no need to really do it. Then they want to spend money later for a plot, so we're trying to determine how much that is compared to other people, and invent a lot of numbers. It can just introduce a lot of problems of ambiguity that don't exist if it's already defined mechanically.

The lack of organic development of RP on grid by happenstance is the primary reason I decided to start creating a MU myself and it was shaped by my experiences on the Reach. After immediately coming from a game that had an awful lot of random RP that significantly shaped plot and started those fun RP chain reactions constantly of one small thing leading to dozens of other things that ultimately would be pivotal in character development.

The Reach was the first game I played that I saw people mention how much they hated social RP, and that really surprised me when I started. Then I came to the disappointing conclusion that what they REALLY meant was, 'I hate RP that won't go anywhere', and that social RP was code for that. It was the first time I played where social RP was largely without consequence, and I just wasn't used to sandboxes doing that.

I firmly believe that insular sandboxes are largely a result of RP social interaction being mostly consequence free, which is incredibly stifling to meaningful spontaneity. Not everyone would think of that as a flaw, but I don't enjoy it, and I think it's actually not that hard to design in a way that counteracts it (after all, I came from a game that months before was exactly that style where the Reach was night and day different).

I figure you have a few different options, and I honestly couldn't tell you what would work best for you or what you might find easiest to implement, since I think you'll have to take a look and putter with them a bit before you make a decision. You could have the default evennia webpage with a separate wiki that imports data, which is what we wound up with right now but it has its drawbacks. You could integrate a django wiki app with the webpage to have the functionality of both. Or you could try to just add in wiki like functionality to the webpage without adding in a whole app for it. I'm honestly not sure what would best suit your needs or be easiest, so I'd just take a look and think of approaches and then ask for advice on the evennia chat.

Hmm, one suggestion- a step by step tutorial of building a couple simple commands added to characters in game I think would be very useful, since I think most MUSH players think in those terms for implementation.

@phase-face It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.

I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.

@surreality Yeah, and I also kind of figure that when the game comes up I'll be too busy GMing or dealing with players to go back and revise systems easily- particularly if anything I change while it's live impacts players, then they'd get all pissed off and potentially feel cheated if something they got accustomed to changed.

@Ganymede And that's very kind of you, and I honestly would not have held it against you if you did nay-say it. Most big ambitious MU projects never launch, or settle for much less or have catastrophic problems due to their ambitions. You don't know me at all to say why mine would be any different, and I'm expecting to deal with a lot of doubt and negativity- I'd read it all and make sure there's nothing I'm missing in terms of a reality check.

That said, a major project I ran for fun lasted twelve years or so and I was overseeing hundreds of gamers, and my shortest project I controlled went about three years, so I'm a long-haul kind of person and I think I can handle it. For this MU I'm working on I spent NaNoWriMo just writing lore/story for it in game, and I ran a python script at the end for a word count, was around a hundred thousand from November. Seemed kind of in the spirit of the project, anyways.

@Ide @GamerNGeek I think you guys might be overlooking the challenges inherent in monetizing a MUSH vs a MUD, the latter I think is very easy and straight forward, while the former is extremely difficult. There's a marked difference in the service provided and game between the two.

Okay, so if you try to monetize a MUSH, you have two options, you can go for a Subscription model, and/or you can go for a micro-transaction model which has just been shown to be vastly superior for massively multiplayer games due to the far higher upper end players are willing to spend. That's why virtually every MMO has gone f2p with micro-transactions. But what exactly do they charge for?

Well, for subscriptions, that's very simple, they charge for access to their game, with the understanding there will be a level of staff support to something that's otherwise presented as is. A MUSH could definitely follow a sub like that, if they presented themselves as a superior product, sure. But when you get to micro-transactions, which in my opinion is way more important than subscription models, that's where it falls apart.

Microtransactions in MUDs, MMOs, MOBAs all charge for largely the same thing. Some kind of modification for the service that is similar to what you could get if you invest more time in it, or a stylistic difference from similarly available things. IE unique appearance skins, items, and the like. These are all fully automated things. Once the designers invest the time into creating them, it's a flip of a switch. There is no resources whatsoever taken from the game, and even pay to win style games typically have a truly minimal effect on the world.

The same wouldn't be even remotely true for a MUSH.

Extremely little in MUSHes are truly automated. VERY little. Look at WoD mushes. I mean no disrespect when I say that, but they are tabletop simulators with extremely little coded systems, because they are usually way more about narrative and the interaction between people. Most have extremely little to separate their sandbox from a chatroom except for the format. So the single resource you can really give people are the time of GMs, and if you are monetizing that, you are talking about putting a price on human labor, and that gets VERY VERY expensive very fast. How much do any hotlines cost to pay them? -That's- what you'd be trying to do in microtransactions, and you'd be talking about a minimum of ten bucks an hour for a premium service. It's an entire order of magnitude difference from micro-transactions in MUDs

tl;dr, a MUSH needs to become more like a MUD to be financially viable.

@surreality I think you captured the amount of negativity and pessimism that sets up people for failure, where they are afraid of how delays look and lets it bait them into trading short term solutions that really box them in later. I think you really nailed how much very subtle pressure can get to creators.

I definitely could have launched 6 months ago if I did a standard MU install, plugged in a ton of available soft code and then was willing to just abstract GM a ton of things. But I really worry that saying, 'Well I can just GM that or do that by hand' is a huge trap if you know something could be automated and not have to become a +job every time. Sure, a bunch of things can't and shouldn't be, like stories, but I do think a lot of staff burn out from work that might have been preventable by earlier structure that never really got put in place.

@Ide said:

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

If you create micro-transactions for character mods, you still have a huge problem with them actually doing something with it. If it was a total sandbox with no GMs at all, and only PRP plots, it would work great, but what happens when the dude that dropped 500 dollars to have a thousand XP WoD character wants to have GM attention? Then it still comes back to trying to provide a service that requires GM man hours rather than automation, and that's a fundamental core game difference that makes it way harder.

On a very small scale, maybe, but as it increases massive numbers I think it either needs heavy automation (a MUD) or to change the game behavior that everyone relates with a MUSH.

@ThugHeaven said:

I'm not answering for Apos. I think people would pay for an extra dot, the problem is most people won't. It will create a disparity that the game itself just can't overcome. The people that won't pay will simply play somewhere else. That will leave the small group that did pay, who will inevitably demand more since they are paying. I don't think the mu*ing community is big enough to support the kind business model a pay to play game needs.

Micro transactions are actually super interesting. I forget the exact numbers, but it's something like only 2% of customers use them heavily, but they use them to a point where it just blows subscription models out of the water. So for financial viability you need to have either a large percentage of people that would go with a sub, or a really tiny percentage that have almost no upper boundary in what they spend. In that 2% of MMO players, there's a shocking amount of people that don't think much about plunking down thousands of dollars even if the other 98% wouldn't give a dime. It's funny that the industry never expected that, which is why they all started as subscription then they went to micro transactions once they realized, 'holy shit there's a few loons out there that are loaded!'.

But in a MUD, what a character can do is fundamentally limited by the code of the game. They can get items, they can kill all the monsters in the game, but they can't tactically nuke the game and make it end in an apocalypse. A MUSH, by its nature, is freeform. Sure they might pay through the nose to have characters, but they are still dealing with a GM to use that character who then has to make stories to suit them, which has the horrifying implication that basically every time the player wants to do something it's a customer service encounter where you are having an employee tell a customer they can't do something if it would impact other players in a way that would hit your bottom line. And if someone thinks they can manage that, man, hats off to them and I would probably pay money myself just to see it.

@Sammi Every scene in public rooms would be open in some games, to make it not open would be a break of the game culture and incredibly rude, since you are forcing everyone else to conform to your own sandbox, ie being very entitled and imposing upon everyone else on the game. In that environment of course individuals would rp immediately, since being in public rooms is an actual advertisement and invitation to RP.

I really think you are confusing distinct and different gaming cultures with entitlement. Speaking to someone oocly would be flat out rude, since you are destroying the mood of their scene by doing so, much in the same way spamming people with ooc chatter in an intense scene would be on most games.

@Roz said:

One of the things I don't understand: there's been a lot of talk of people liking staff being Dark to watch things for the purposes of spontaneous plot. But why exactly do they have to be Dark to do this?

They don't, it's just more immersive if they aren't. Same reason I dislike people ever discussing RP with me in advance, or ever talking to me in OOC to arrange a scene. I just don't do it if I can help it.

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

@Admiral Its nice to finally have my initial predictions and warnings validated.

They claimed it 'could have gone either way'... but it was really more like TR's 'there's a chance the apocalypse will happen!' in that things would have had to go WAY south for it to happen that way

I didn't play there so I can't say this is the case, but I've noticed staff on a lot of games have their heart set on a particular outcome and they throw out 'anything could happen' when they really, really don't mean that. I think that unless you really don't have a dog in the race and are okay with GMing every possible outcome, it's a bad idea to say that and get player expectations worked up. I usually don't have any preference myself, and I think staff not having PCs as anything more than story catalysts, fonts exposition, or clue dispensers etc really helps.

@Arkandel If someone puts in a CG background that's incredibly creepy and a gigantic red flag, with a standard game someone might question them on it and veto it. With a yes-only MU, they won't be questioned, but assume that if they act in a way against OOC rules they will be punished. This is has a core problem:

If you stop someone from entering the gateway, their toxicity never hits the player base at all. If you wait for them to fuck with people, then likely some people quit, say screw this hobby, and never come back even if the guilty party is punished. So with an auditing approach, you absolutely allow terrible things to occur rather than prevention and this costs players. This is why I think a very severe approach for OOC problems is critical, rather than just recommended.

I understand this can just be seen as a cost and trade off for permissiveness, and that can even be fine and justified. But I think it can't be amplified by a cautious approach to problem players. At the very least, I would make the equivalent of whatever report or GM call or whatever code you use require an immediate response to harassment, not something that can be investigated later.