Best posts made by Apos

Updated to the new version of Evennia to finally merge that ancient fork, and on a new VPS- 45.33.87.194 port 3000. Think we fixed most of the bugs related to the swap but yell if you see anything, and channels will need to be readded.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

This game looks really interesting to me, especially as it approaches beta, but I have been curious about the tasks.

Are there ones you have to complete daily? I'm fine with weekly, but leery of anything that's going to need maintenance on a daily basis. I just dunno if I'm going to be in the mood to log in that often, even if I'm able to (and I won't be sometimes).

Naw, everything is on a weekly system, and most aren't intended to be completed in a single week. How they work right now is an abstraction for Leader of Group A asking People with influence over Group B for help with any random task off screen. For example, a noble of a house concerned that the recent chaos has made merchant shipping by sea more dangerous asks some of the coastal houses with large navies for to help guard the waters, that'd be a military task, they agree to support it, and once it passes a threshold it completes, different rumors are generated automatically so everyone in the city can see what's going on (even if the individuals involved are obscured), and resources are generated. I think it's misleading from the posts to see it as a heart of the game or anything like that, since it's more of a minigame for players to make offscreen actions from bargaining RP meaningful, and I haven't heard about anyone being pressured about them and none of the tasks have innate time crunches on them and just persist until someone finally gets enough support for it.

While I do want to be pretty careful about the resources generated giving some groups a larger edge, I don't think it's too much of a realistic concern since while the resources are meaningful, it's still very minor compared to the bulk of the economic strength of the noble houses from their domains. For example. Someone trying to do a Littlefinger-I-Know-Everyone-And-Can-Get-Dozens-To-Help-Me type guy can do it, and probably knock out a couple tasks, maybe getting like 30-50 resources or something if they worked like mad at it. That would be under 2% of the income of the wealthiest great house at the moment, and like a tenth of a percent of some of the Scary Big Bad Organizations. So there's definitely a sense of, 'Bob the Fast Talker is getting rich' from an individual perspective, but from a macro perspective compared to what the powerful organizations are doing, it's pretty mild.

@Arkandel I'd rather still hear the criticism for anything I have, even if it's not near being officially open. Even if it's problems I already know about and are on the to do list to fix and clarify, I'd rather have it emphasized than risk me forgetting about it down the line, so I think it's very helpful.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

More difficult? Well, like I said, Mush-likes can create characters from the login screen. I had no idea that this was difficult for Evennia. It honestly shocks me. To me, having something that reads emails and creates a character that way sounds far more technically complex. This shocks me enough that I'm going to look into it, because using email to trigger an automated system that I at least feel could be built-in sounds, well, silly. Implementation differences, I suppose? But still, a bit of the head-scratcher.

I'd say it's like 30% technical and 70% trying to future proof from an administration angle to avoid problems with scale. For example, in evennia you probably notice that every bit has both a player object and character object associated with it, rather than a single object, and this is designed to allow easy puppeting for games that have that. That sounds like it would be ideal for a roster game, but it has problems there, in that you want the transference to be permanent and eradicate any previous links, so that becomes a big headache where you really want to transfer accounts- and that means you'd need some form of master account, then a player object, then a character object, meaning that it's easiest to largely ignore the player/character objection distinction and make them 1:1 anyways and not try to do roster stuff as a form of puppeting. So then we go back to some form of master accounts even past player objects, and man, having an email (or a dummy string field) for that is way easier than a lot of other options. And that brings us to the administrative future side I mentioned.

And that's pretty much exactly what @Sunny is thinking of there- if we created just throw away accounts, that means an automated method of pruning them, because otherwise you get this ongoing gigantic list of dead accounts just from anyone stopping by to browse rather than guest accounts, with all the name validation pita therein. These aren't insurmountable, but I do think it's a lot more work than email.

I respect both of you a lot, and I get what you are coming from. This hobby has not done a bang up job of producing really stable environments. This, in turn, makes a lot of people pretty damned wary of staff, worrying that their time investment in a game can be completely flushed by someone losing their patience and freaking out, or acting unfairly or unreasonably. I get that. I'm really sympathetic to it. I'm really conscious of it when something is testing my patience.

But it doesn't do us any favors to expect someone to bend over so far backwards they are basically the equivalent of a poor customer service rep dealing with screaming customers. That kind of thing might feel safe and reassuring, knowing that person probably won't lose their cool, but it also means that they are the softy afraid to say no that any unreasonable person on a game will try to exploit. I think most players would feel unsettled by any display of a temper by a staffer, even if it was completely justified. But they will absolutely leave a game that's taken over by unethical players exploiting a doormat that is completely unwilling to push back enough to maintain a healthy, positive atmosphere. Yes, arguing with players can be a huge red flag. But let's also not forget how many games croak run by super sweet and nice people.

@Wizz Yeah I'm def willing to say 'my bad' about that.

tbh if someone logs into Hello Kitty, Island Adventure and says that the lack of rape and sexual assault themes just ruins their immersion, maybe the problem isn't the game.

Pure command line only is too high a bar for the vast majority of current generation gamers. I'm in a spot where I have more people than I can really handle comfortable at the moment anyways but like, I haven't even bothered trying to talk non-MU rp buddies into trying out the game. I absolutely would have if we had context sensitive menus, right click functionality, etc. On the veeeeeeeeery long term to-do.

There's multiple kinds of social systems, and social combat. My principle interest is designing systems that will effect how characters deal with NPCs, and the value of their standing with them, and frankly nearly everything that's handwaved in the game deals with NPCs- social/economic/military resources are an abstraction of being able to utilize pull with npcs, for example. Ultimately, every interaction with faceless npcs from the income of domains to military actions to gaining or spending resources will be influenced by social mechanics.

About social combat, there's a philosophical difference in MUD style arbitration and others, in just how system reliant something is. For example, some dude that rolls a combat beast standing outside the place new players connect and spam killing them. In a MUD, that's arbitrated by mechanics that shut that down. In MUSHes, that's arbitrated by knowing that's unacceptable socially and having GMs or players that prevent it, with likely some softer mechanics that make the most egregious violations improbable to avoid annoying retcons. Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.

@mietze said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

If people can just buy a bunch of retainers to help with investigations if they can't/won't purchase their own investigate higher, doesn't that render obsolete the niche for high investigate pcs?

I definitely appreciate the concern. Now I think the thing that counteracts it most there is that there's no limit on the number of people helping in an investigation, and they all make a significant difference in the rate something is finished. Right now, most investigations are really done by teams of people- some people do slowly gain things on their own, especially if they are stated for it, but it's difficult enough where most people aren't really like, 'oh I'll just do this alone with my retainer bob' since the threshold is so high, I usually see it like 4 PCs and 2 retainers helping out in one big thing as a team, rather than a bunch of smaller ones.

We are really nudging people towards the 'work as a team thing' not just because of the whole wanting to encourage collaborating aspect, but because it's really, really, really difficult to keep up with the rate people investigate otherwise if there's like 40 separate ones in per week. (I was spending 15+ hours a week just writing them at one point, before we dramatically raised difficulty)

@Collective Hard for me to give anything but extremely broad advice that I'm not sure will be useful, but lemme give it a shot. Your 4 major IC challenges, the Mistrunning and Urban Exploration are super dependent upon active GMing, which isn't really a bad thing, but since that's so manpower intensive I'd think hard about making sure those 2 things result in a ton of hooks for your second 2 challenges- city politics and gangland/mystery men.

Because a lot of the game will be everyone reacting to the things done by active GMing, and then trying to create story about it, you need to make sure those latter 2 categories have enough meat so people can make their own fun off of it, otherwise imo you'll run into cases where people have trouble finding things to do because it is very funneled by the first couple categories, and since those are manpower limited you might have trouble accommodating them.

Frankly I don't think you need to worry about ideas being too niche or anything like that. If you are telling fun stories, people are going to come and play. The trouble will be only being one person and only being able to tell stories for so many people at once, and making sure the stories you tell create other stories that everyone can have fun with.

@Ghost I am certain with a great deal of effort that it could be mitigated, but I think the stories around the FCs are so core to the settings that it would present a constant challenge, and I think that's just always going to be extremely difficult to reconcile if you want to include existing IPs. I just personally find it cleaner to go, 'okay not an existing IP universe at all', but that's an entirely different kind of game.

@Arkandel said in High Fantasy:

I always thought it was really weird there were so few roleplaying D&D or Pathfinder MU* around given how popular they are on table-top.

More difficult to run and create a sustainable immersive environment not dependent on staff due to the lack of details in between stories.

Good old raph. He's so very bad at this.

@roz said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I mean, sure, obviously that's a thing that commonly happens. That's also just called bad staffing. You do need good staffing to make any sort of system like this work. There's no "this system will totally work even with lazy or conflict-averse staffers."

I think it's a little contrary to what I was trying to get at originally. While you're right, you can definitely design things systematically that makes it way way way way easier or harder. Like I would rather start from the point of, 'Well, a lot of staff are conflict-averse. What system is least bad with those people?'

Generally, you'd want to design something with the least amount of decision making, with systems that resemble what choices would be made by someone fair minded. Like if every top tier FC had a set limit for how long someone could possess the character before it had to go up for grabs, and then the metric for deciding who got it next was automatically determined based on how you quantified who made me the most rp for the widest spectrum of people among. I mean sure, any of those things can be weighted unfairly too, but frankly even in systems that have really terrible weights there tends to be way less hostility because it's a little bit emotionless and detached.

I don't like changing mediums when into something, I find it jarring. I would keep things in both places, preferably automatically without any need for double updates, though I can understand if that's a technical limitation.

Mildly constructive is pretty nebulous, since almost all of the big blowups are about behavior of either players or staff, any criticism of that is gonna seem like a personal attack anyways. I think it's always going to be tone and whether or not a post is suggesting constructive changes, rather than asking if they would consider dying in a fire or fornicating with themselves.

I personally would just have mildly constructive a place to discuss ideas and design, and the hog pit a place to discuss specific games or people or examples of behavior. Because the latter is always going to be personal, imo. I'd just open the hog pit up to make membership standard with an opt out, even if I think the whole, 'omg moving to the hog pit is suppressing speech' is histrionic and silly. Right now I don't really notice which threads are where, frankly.

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@wizz said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I don't find the toxicity WORA was known for "entertaining" and I have a pretty low opinion of people who do, and it frustrates and discourages me that big meltdowns like the UH X-Men drama tend to draw new faces who want to see more of the same.

Yeah. I get that @Arkandel has no intention of doing away with the hog pit. That's the mods' right and it is not my intention to beat a dead horse.

But I will say this: We talk sometimes about the future of MUSHing, about how hard it is to draw in new players, etc. As someone who knows writers who might be interested, who has a daughter who some day might be interested... I can't in good conscience invite them into a gaming community that is so darn toxic. And I'm not just talking about MSB here, because the same attitude that feeds the Hog Pit pervades the games too.

Now it's not all bad. But it is pretty disheartening.

The question I ask myself now is, 'Have I helped cultivate an environment where I can be reasonably confident that any new person will have positive experiences, and that no one will randomly be rude to them?' With the community as it is, I don't think I have much choice but to be incredibly strict in order to get that outcome. I pretty much figure anyone running a game has to decide whether they are going to be forgiving, only police the big problems (if that), and accept the churn that comes from annoying microaggressions that drive people off games, or be ready to fight endlessly to stop it.

@thatguythere said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thenomain
Except that to me this place is not a community, any more than the classifieds of a paper would be or any other messaging service.

You're very consistent in your philosophy regarding games, and have an extremely transactional approach to them that I consider the far opposite of my point of views generally. I don't think a transactional approach is intrinsically bad or anything like that, but I think it doesn't fit the format so great. Having a, 'Everyone should get in, get what they are looking for, and get out' approach really works best when you can't expect reciprocal behavior due to sheer size making it unlikely you'll meet the same people again. That makes sense to me in an MMO, but MUs are so much smaller than that. Since people play with each other over and over again, it's just natural that community starts to form because if we're going to be dealing with one another time and again, why not?

Like, at first it seems weird and maybe even a little over invested that people take their reputations on MUs so seriously, since hey we're anonymous people through the internet. But not so much, really. We collaborate with each other so often and so consistently, what people think of us can really matter. No one wants to devote a ton of effort into something to just see it explode in a profoundly unsatisfying way, and those kind of collaborative relationships that form are people buffering themselves from those disappointments. And that's why a community is natural for anyone wanting something long term and not willing to risk their work and effort on a spin of the wheel.