Best posts made by Apos

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Going to mention my long-standing request again: a constructive dedicated dev section for brainstorming and games in development. This isn't the same thing as constructive generally, and I really would like to see it get a home. I genuinely think it would be a net positive for the forum. It'd be useful for startups, idea pitches, and existing games looking at adding new systems they want brainstorming and such for.

I'd really, really like to see this. Add about forty more 'really's there.

It would be cool to be able to post, 'Hey I would like to try X' without getting like, a barrage of how much that idea sucks and 20 posts about people bitching why won't someone make Y or Z instead until the original poster flees in terror. Like, I get the whole, 'Well they wouldn't have made a game anyways' but I dunno if 'game design by hazing' is really all that productive.

@thatguythere Yeah, I think that's definitely true. A lot of older players are way more risk averse about not seeing their time wasted, a lot more protective of their time/hostile towards people that impose upon it, and also way, way less patient when they think they recognize patterns that have been problems for them in the past.

I don't blame people for this. It's understandable, even if I think sometimes it can be counterproductive. Like for example, the ad threads or idea pooling threads that turn super sharply negative really fast are symptomatic of that. Like I know it's easy to say everyone is old and cranky but it's more like, 'if people have been doing this for 20 years, and they see something that has failed multiple times being talked about, while they impatiently wait for something that they can have fun in, they get pissy unnecessarily at some poor game creator.'

From an administrative angle, what I've done is a bunch of internal tools to help sorting it. We keep track of all the private plot type notes for PCs and it has a searchable index with tags for a dozen different categories of special things about the characters, and then can cross reference with the plots they are involved in, all the story responses they've gotten, and so on. And we have an extra alert for any player that hasn't ever gotten any form of GMing, so we can keep weaving in new players.

@wizz said in Midnight MUSH:

@wildbaboons said in Midnight MUSH:

It's more that some outspoken posters given the impression of wide spread disdain.

FATE's an award-winning, popular system. I was more baffled by the intensity of TNP's opinion and a little frustrated with the way they presented it than concerned they were right, but it's whatever.

I really don't think the system matters very much at all. Pick any one and you'll have a tiny percentage of people that are enthused about it and will play it, another tiny percentage that will avoid it, and then an overwhelming majority that are completely indifferent to the choice and do not care one way or the other.

It only matters, in so much that virtually no one that logs in randomly is going to go, 'okay I'll come back as soon as I read these books!' People want to just log in and play. So someone is going to have to invest a huge amount of effort into selling the game to people and acclimating them to a new system, making it fun for them as they do it, and if that happens then people will try it out. If someone isn't prepared to do that, then they won't. It's really simple.

Tons of people kid themselves and say, 'oh yeah that sounds like a fun game, I'll definitely invest the time to get involved, get stories going, AND learn a system while doing it'. Then they get distracted by something and they are gone. That's normal. So someone wanting to get a game going has to pretty much have more enthusiasm than other people, or be reliant on someone else that does.

Yeah no offense guys but if a mod's job is moving threads, and in a thread you suggest posts should be moved, maybe they think you are suggesting it because it kind of falls under the job description. It wasn't like this, unfathomable leap of logic that you should be horrified at the obtuseness of it all. I'm just saying.

Some games just can't decide if they are competitive or a collaboration. And some players will want the maximum competition when it is to their benefit and the maximum collaboration when it is not.

I shrivel and die inside a little at the thought of trying to run a historical game with high fidelity, it just feels to me like a soul crushing experience of trying to please a ton of mutually exclusive desires.

There's wildly different expectations for what is necessary to be faithful to a setting and what would be needlessly pedantic and be wrongfunning someone. The thought of the million conversations about someone upset about something being jarring, and other people thinking it's a non issue but finding something else jarring and immersion breaking strikes me as the most miserable game of whack-a-mole that a staffer could play. Unless everyone is on close to the same page, it would really suck, and the less niche it is the way less likely more than a handful would be on the same page thematically.

Secondly, most MU players are not playing games to play the most ordinary, standard examples of time periods they can do it. They want to play something exceptional that they can make their mark on a game with, and for many, many people, that means something exotic and different. That directly undermines historical settings. Even ignoring again fights from people being mad that an OC concept is jarring to a setting and having wildly different views on whether something fits or not, the amount of bad feels over people upset at each other who gets to play the exotic character or watch the setting to get overrun by Exceptions To The Rule characters strikes me as zero fun to administrate as a game runner.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

And that's ignoring just, the usual social maladaptive shit that's so common on games that it's just taken for granted, the people who have no idea how to interact with anyone who isn't broken the same way they are and the way that geek social fallacies are like burned into the fabric of everything and not to be questioned

I’m going to say this in a non-repulsive way in response.

If you think you can avoid MUSH maladaptive behaviors in real life, you are either tremendously naive or stupidly optimistic. You might as well admit that you live in a box if you can honestly and introspectively believe that real life is any less dysfunctional.

I think this one is worth talking about.

For anyone that works with people in conflict- anyone involved with the law, bouncers, people that field complaints or work in customer service or terrible parts of retail. Yeah sure, you see maladaptive behaviors on a daily basis. And for leaders or managers responsible for organizing other people and making them get along, they see social dynamics and the same atrocious behaviors of the worst aspects of MU communities.

But most people honestly don't. A lot of 20 somethings trying to get into an RP community for the first time might have never been seriously creeped on before, or stalked, or had someone be violently combative for no good reason. Yeah, these people are out in the real world, and a lot of us have to deal with them in our day jobs, but that can also make us easily forget how many people go about their day to day lives and work jobs where they almost never meet the worst aspects of humanity over and over again.

Some of us definitely have to run into those behaviors time and again, day in and day out. Others just don't. And we shouldn't let that skew our perspectives and make us tolerant of it on MUs, imo.

@saosmash The temptation now is overwhelming to write a clue called "There's no accounting for taste".

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And let's say you're someone like @Ganymede who lacks the time and/or inclination to learn how to code. That's fine. So you need a coder.

How many MUSHcode experts are out there? A dozen? There are tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of Python/Ruby experts. You're FAR more likely to be able to find a programmer pal who knows one of these languages, or someone who's willing to learn.

This reminded me of something that I hadn't really thought about until now. So in running Arx for about two years, I've had maybe a dozen offers to come on board as a coder, due to someone being familiar with python. It comes up enough that Tehom's staple response is to ask them to do a pull request for Evennia first to show they are serious.

It strikes me as unlikely that any mush would have a dozen people with softcode familiarity offer to come on board to throw in a system for fun. I think even in as small a hobby as this, there's significantly more people with python experience than there is with softcode experience... even on games -made- with soft code.

@Warma-Sheen I find saying, 'I wish I had handled that better, and I regret how it went down' is unobjectionable and usually helps mend fences. It's, 'but here's why I thought you were in the wrong and your part in why it went bad' is the part that just pisses people off, and just comes across as someone trying to justify the dumb shit they did.

@ixokai said in Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?:

All of this can be boiled down to: Collaborate. This is a collaborative environment where we all want to have fun.

So basically everyone should stop, collaborate and listen.

I think we're talking about a few different things and they are getting a little conflated.

When I think of reasonable players and staff having differing expectations. Sometimes it's just a lack of clarity in what a game should be, where it's hard to present detail that would clear up misconceptions without overwhelming someone looking at the game. But sometimes it's just players wanting to add something that the owner never thought of, or considered, or take things in a different potential direction.

And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.

The unreasonable ones are disciplinary stuff, and I think a different scope of discussion. But I think the, 'people after different kinds of RP' is an entirely different discussion from either of those things.

As a hobby, I don't think it's any secret we have a whole hell of a lot of introverts or people with social anxiety, and I mention this because it is not exactly hard for someone to just not get invested in a game. Someone plays, they get one RP partner, that RP partner quits, and maybe that player logs in once a week ever after and just idles in their room for forever. They just aren't engaged, and a lot of them linger forever kind of hoping someone else engages them, because going out and creating that engagement is very challenging and frankly scary to a ton of players. And more often than not, someone stuck in that position, of maybe finding a single thread of RP they value... those people are going to be written off by other players, generally unfairly.

I'm not like, a brilliant storyteller or writer or organizer, but I do think I might have a knack for engaging with people that are having trouble finding footing, which loops back to that other conversation about social scenes, and people's differing value in them. I think more often than not, a lot of players that are written off by other players as having niche interests just need to be engaged with, and they will respond accordingly and get invested in the game. I strongly think that the 'person that plays a game not meant for that kind of RP and refuses to engage' is so rare it might as well not really exist, but the 'person that has no idea how to get involved' is overwhelmingly common, and probably one of the biggest single issues that any game runner deals with.

It's super, super important to not mistake the latter for the former, in my opinion.

@Lisse24 said in The Metaplot:

I'm all for creating a continuous and interconnected world where players actions matter, however I believe that plot should be driven from the ground up, and derive from how players interact with the world and complications set in front of them, rather than the top down.

Yeah I agree and I intentionally structured things that way when I designed it but plot is always going to go to the most proactive players that are put in a lot of effort to get involved. Like if you reach out aggressively to the more passive players that effort can be seen as intrusive and unwelcome so it pretty much has to be that way, just presented as an option to involvement if they show interest. The, 'I'm not going to do any work whatsoever and just complain I'm not being involved' is pretty pervasive, in part because there's a lot of good hearted people that will reach out to the complainers even if their complaints have no merit at all. I personally think enabling that behavior is a pretty bad idea, since it taxes the more proactive people that create for the game.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

I realize it's an emotionally charged issue. I realize you have strong opinions. That shouldn't stand in the way of a civilized conversation.

While that's coming from a reasonable place, it's kind of dumb. Okay, a lot of people in this thread have been assaulted (they've mentioned it in the past). This is a lot like going to a particularly angry member of Black Lives Matter and going, "Well, I know your brother was shot for no reason by the police, but not all police are bad, and your tone isn't constructive."

But it's a lot better than @Tyche who is pretty much like, 'Oh yeah you guys being assaulted is bad and shit but you shouldn't talk so much about it and I doubt it happens nearly as much as you think and your experiences aren't valid. Whelp glad we wrapped up the systemic problems of sexual assault in one curt dismissal, let's move on.'

@magee101 A constructive way to say this would be to maybe suggest narrowing the scope of the project down in the short term to make it more manageable, with suggestions that the OP might find useful. For example saying that if they feel overwhelmed, maybe just focus on the characters and the most basic elevator pitches for them and how she sees them interacting.

I don't think there is any case when telling someone that they should give up on a creative project is helpful or constructive, unless they are specifically asking for your opinion on whether it is worth the investment of their time.

@mietze Passive people deflecting the blame for a lack of effort on their behalf is the norm in the hobby, whether player or staff. There's just going to be a lot of finger pointing for who let a story die regardless.

@Ganymede But we get cheaper candy tomorrow so I think it balances out.

@Thenomain Doesn't happen as much on games with coded money and any feeling of resource scarcity. It's a symptom of money feeling meaningless, and the largest reason for that is because it's not coded so no character feels the need to RP not having access to it when they need it. I think not having coded money is analogous to not having any way of showing someone taking damage. In full consent games without systems, sure people will pose getting hurt. How hurt are they? Shrug, there's a lot of dumb ways to track it, but the equivalent of saying, 'well okay since there's bad systems for tracking damage, we should handwave it and go without' creates way, way more problems than people think.