@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:
@Nemesis @Apos Not sure why you directed any of that at me, since (neither of) you addressed anything whatsoever that I said.
I edited Nemesis' quote to remove a mountain of vulgarity and insults, and said, 'ftfy' to him, as in 'fixed that for you', which is a meme sometimes used for things like that. Nemesis then edited his post to reflect it, which might be confusing.
@three-eyed-crow said in Spotlight.:
@apos said in Spotlight.:
100% the main cause of cliquishness in the hobby is people wanting to limit their exposure to microaggressions and griping like that. This hobby imo is powered entirely by enthusiasm of participants. It is incredibly easy for just a few persistently negative people to pretty much gut a game faster than a Custodius could ever dream of doing so.
Yeah, I'll admit this BS is the primary thing that makes me jaded about the hobby. I think the cheaters and harassers and true bad actors are anomalies. They're terrible, but you ban them and, problem done. But you're going to have to deal with jealousy every day, even from players who are mostly OK a lot of the time. You're going to have to deal with pettiness every day. This stuff is human but it also just really wears me down. I do this for fun, why am I bothering with these people? I tend not to bother when I know what BS awaits me and I'll confess it's changed the way I approach playing, even though I still enjoy it.
Honestly I think more than anything else, Hellfrog's work in trying to counter and minimize that stuff on Arx is the reason for the game's popularity. Of course it still happens, and a lot more than I'd like, but the amount of vaguebookish type of pettiness that results from that stuff imo is smaller and lower key on Arx's channels than games a tenth of its size. Consistently being unafraid to give a heads up to people, 'Hey that was kinda shitty, please don't' even when staffer knows they are gonna get in reply, 'HOW DARE YOU THREATEN MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH, HOW DARE' and dreads the interaction imo is vital. Most of the game isn't on the MSB, and frankly, a lot of players have no idea how petty others can be. It's really exhausting and unfun for staff to police, but if it makes someone go, 'gosh maybe I shouldn't say that shitty thing about someone else's RP' on a channel, I think it's a win.
So every once in a while, I have someone mention a coded feature on another game that they really miss. This could be almost anything, but it generally was something that other games might have done without, embracing handwaving or abstraction or requests instead of something coded and automated, if they had it in any way at all.
What are some features that you feel like made finding RP easier, or improved the quality of life playing there, that you wish other games had?
What are some coded systems that made the world feel more real, or more immersive, or helped get invested in it?
What are some mini games that were just fun, and the game didn't really need to have at all, but you enjoyed and spent time playing with?
@faraday said in Real life versus online behaviors:
@arkandel said in Real life versus online behaviors:
On a MUSH or even MSB the pool is so much smaller, and possessing a recognizable identity is super important - your reputation matters, which is one of the reasons being an oldbie often conveys advantages either formally or otherwise.
I don’t think it matters as much as you think in some respects. I mean, how long did people play on Serenity? Or that crazy pants supers game that had a gazillion flamey posts here? Have hog pit posts really cost anyone RP?
MU players are shockingly tolerant to bad behavior. There’s also the illusion at least of being able to start fresh because we have no global screennames or other player identity. (And it may in part account for why so many MU players are resistant to such identity tracking.)
The reaction in most cases is just to be more insular, rather than actually confronting the bad behavior. So even when there are consequences, you don’t get the “you’re a jerk so I’m not going to play with you” feedback.
Yeah I think most MU players are really tolerant of it happening around them and extremely intolerant of it happening directly to them or close friends. I don't personally think Spider or Custodius are particularly bad comparatively to a lot of people, but they are so omnipresent that they are unavoidable in ways most people just normally ignore from everyone else.
@aria said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@apos My brain is going a little swimmy trying to follow all of this, but that's likely because it's late and I've had a headache for almost eight straight hours now....
What I am taking away from this is a lot of "making social skills relevant" and I cannot tell you how incredibly happy I am about that, particularly as someone who has spent hundreds of XP on the damned things in order to fit both the concept my character came with and the idea of 'good leader'. I have had little cause to use most of those skills outside @actions thus far, but such is the pitfalls of pretty much any social system on any MU* ever.
To keep it simple- there will be a lot, lot, lot of automated things for social characters to do, in terms of generating prestige, resources, or AP, with different systems costing one or the other based on what someone is doing.
Over time, we'll just have more automated ways of effecting the environment, and letting characters feel like their actions have a meaningful effect on the game world. Domains will rise and fall, characters will become famous or infamous, and that stuff can be automated. I wanna focus on metaplot and the more politics can be system driven and by players I think that's fine.
@templari But you're literally posting on a thread about slurs saying that pushback against saying slurs makes you feel uncomfortable as a moderate, when I'm a moderate and think that is dumb. So I mean, if you're not saying that, it's kind of off topic, no?
Well it's kinda like if there was a thread debating about like, whether holocaust denial was protected speech and then someone chimed in saying the board was too left leaning and unfriendly. I mean. It might be. They might have a point. But that's a really, really weird place to bring it up that has some uncomfortable associations. That's an extreme example but I hope you can see what I'm getting at and why I'm like, 'whoa hold up buddy, that's not really a political thing' to me. Obviously slurs are nowhere near as bad but like, I just don't think that's a political thing.
@wizz said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:
I've said it a few times over the years, but my dream:
God Wars 2's map/movement and combat systems, integrated with like an RPI's social systems. Change the mechanics behind progression and powers and skills and whatnot to fit whatever theme, you could make it modern-day or fantasy, it would be really versatile and fun.
I'm going to need to read up more about this since it's piqued my curiosity, I keep seeing mud players mention God Wars and it seems to have a devoted following
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
@auspice said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
All of these still come down to one thing in the end:
Physical stats trump all.
Which is sort of the crux of the issue.
I disagree. This isn't what I'm asking about at all. It is, however, a very large concern.
If we want to delve into "reality," the vast majority of potential violence is sidetracked by concerns about consequences. People generally don't try to shoot me in the courtroom because there are bailiffs with guns around, and because I'm the Mistress of the Tae-Kwon-Leap. In a MUSH, however, the consequences to the player are substantially less, which makes physical violence a more-available option to resolve conflict.
Maybe I have this all wrong.
Maybe the solution isn't fewer social stats, but giving them more power. Maybe a successful intimidation roll would result in a Condition that would bar or reduce the ability to engage in a fight. Maybe a successful seduction roll would result in a Condition that would bar refusal of simple, non-Breaking-point requests.
So, let's flip the question:
Would you make social stats in the World of Darkness more powerful? If so, how?
(Note, I'm not talking about powers that rely on social stats.)
I generally think it is helpful to go to the endpoint first, of making characters with an equivalent degree of investment in them feel roughly equally threatening to other PCs and roughly equally powerful. In other words, earning the ire of an X amount of xp character specialized in physical, mental, or social skills should represent an equal amount of danger.
@il-volpe imo name it something that is related or relevant to the source material, and something you want to focus on that is illustrative of the theme. Like Brakebills for example.
@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
@apos said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:
Nah, that's not really true. if it was, people would engage with it once then stop if they were disappointed in the results. But the overwhelming majority haven't done it at all, which means that's inaccurate. This is particularly meaningful since like for example modeling skews really heavily to being disproportionately rewarding to low values, like silk having a multiplier of 15 while star iron has a multipler of 3, as an example, but there isn't anyone of any skill and stat combination that's tossing up a random silk outfit per week at minimal cost for exceptionally high returns. No one is.
Yes, your system favors Silk and Umbra over the insanity that is Josephines creations but that's not the real bar to ride. The real bar to ride is that the result is more or less linear with clout and relies heavily of being able and willing to go to 30+ people events.
There's also that very non-trivial bar to make people engage with a mechanic at all. The default state of any player is that they don't know the command exists or why they would want to use it.
Yeah exactly, that's what I was getting at in my post. That the non-formula factors are much more significant than the formulas and ease of use is why we'll revamp it and not the astronomical differences in prestige so much.
Pretty decently sized blind population that plays MUs through accessibility features. Can't think of a video game where that's true.
@Auspice tbh I was thinking of active posters on this board, and Firan, the Reach, and Fallcoast more than my current game because I've leaned so heavily away from conflict mechanics
@Pandora More code helps with it, imo. It removes the vagueness of what's okay to do and what's not, and makes things more organic where people feel it's okay to shut shit down.
@Tez said:
So, no. I've staffed on games that support it -- looking at you, Firan -- but every game I've ever built hasn't needed it, and we haven't had it.
Yeah, the reasons for OOC spying that make sense are so rare that I haven't really come across them at all in practice, and I have a hard time seeing where you'd need it. In cases where I'd investigate abuse, I think the best compromise system I could come up with was having all pages be temporary and flushed at the end of the session, and players can voluntarily submit a copy of their own logs for review (but since it's server side, can't be doctored). Basically the same thing as report functions on MMOs.
@AmishRakeFight You largely captured exactly how I feel about a debate I've been having. For example, I've been debating whether we want to allow staff to go dark at all. For any reason. And it's pretty simple, if we did go dark, it would be entirely to create the kind of spontaneous surprise RP you described with events happening suddenly and unpredictably with GMs present. But even for that, which I think very few players already playing a non-consent game would object to in principle, you have players who say spying is bad period (@sunny made that post above), and just the possibility of it being abused is enough and its existence could serve to undermine trust in staff.
Another example, automatic logging of all events. I've had some testers tell me they just aren't okay with it, even if it's entirely voluntary. They just dislike the -potential- of some of their RP being captured without their consent automatically. Some players are way more prickly about their privacy or anything that feels invasive than others. I personally do not care if everything I do publicly on the grid was captured for posterity but others REALLY disagree.
@mietze said:
I also wonder if volunteer non staff support (player STs) would dry up on a p2p place. It might be an interesting experiment. I could see it going either way, depending on structure.
There's a close real world example that happened, and is probably the closest equivalent I can think of for a support GM staff going p2p.
So way more than a decade ago, Everquest the MMO opened which also happened to be inspired by dikumuds. If anyone remembered the original design, it actually had a lot of striking similarities in command formats to dikumud, and wound up being sued for it, but won out. Anyways, they had a completely volunteer 'lore' staff of unpaid GMs who were supposed to make GM events to flesh out the lore for the game, and run server events for the player base of tens of thousands of players.
It was incredibly popular, whenever some of the lore GMs would pop on, the zones would come close to crashing since a couple hundred players would show up to check it out. The company saw how wildly popular this was, and went, 'Aha, we already charge a monthly subscription of 10 dollars a month, let's launch a premium server called Stormhammer and charge 30 bucks a month'. And then told all these volunteers that they loved what they were doing, but they would have to do it on this special premium server instead.
So... the entire volunteer staff all quit. And the premium server didn't really have a whole lot premium about it, but the company just never really told them why. And that was that.
Pretty sure most people know there's an off chance someone unethical could violate their privacy. So they are like, 'I am going to engage in behavior I enjoy, and it would be embarrassing if it is made public, but it is worth it to me to do it', knowing full well it could embarrass them. Like TS. The same person might be very much not be willing to mention they just shot a guy irl and buried his body, since that's not embarrassing, their life is over, so the risk is very much not worth it. The word expectation is kind of overused here, when I really think the majority of people are like, 'Everything on the internet can be seen, and I hope the people running this aren't assholes, but I will take the risk they might be.'
@Arkandel said:
@Cobaltasaurus raises a good point. How do we feel about IC spying? Literally, a character sneaking into places while unseen OOC to witness what happens in them?
For the sake of argument let's assume that while using Obfuscate you can't see OOC comments, only poses and say's, and of course that if you are caught at it you can't say you were only present OOC.
I think you can avoid most abuse cases if you implement it with a significant chance to fail and also do not inform the spy that they have failed, where success just makes the person dark and they can't tell if they aren't dark. I saw that implementation and I never saw any abuse cases, though I did see some hilarious results from failures.
How sandboxy is the game, really? The more it is, the less thematic purity matters. A lot of WoD games I feel like most of the characters have absolutely no impact on any of my characters whatsoever and vice versa. That's fine, it's not a criticism, just a design choice. But in those games even a character that's drastically out of step with the theme of the game might not be very noticeable to the player base at large.
On a game that's not sandboxy at all, you just can't allow it and would have to immediately remove it, since their existence would disrupt all existing rp.