Posts made by Apos

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?

Population isn't a great metric because like if there's a MU with 15 people on it that all are having a blast and having a wonderful time, I think that's a waaaaaaaaaaaaay healthier environment from 150 addicts that all hate one another's guts and play purely out of spite because quitting is admitting that their nemesis has won. I've been fortunate to avoid that kind of toxicity, and I really think that should be the goal far more than population numbers.

But I do understand wanting more games that represent what you wanna play. We'll release a public repo of code eventually, and I dream of eventually making starting and running a game accessible to the point of a single executable and a Make Your Own Mu startup utility. Faraday has done really impressive work in getting closer to that with Ares, and it's no surprise that FS3 is incredibly popular. The fact it seems to keep being used for things she specifically recommends against and never designed it for is simultaneously extremely complimentary towards her contributions and a pretty pointed lack of other people helping out.

And that goes back to the original point of the thread, as the OP was offering to create something. I think it is counterproductive to ever tell a creator, 'I don't like what you're making, you should do this other thing instead', whether that's a code base, a theme, sandbox vs storydriven or whatever. If they want suggestions, they'll ask.

@thenomain said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

That we used to make our own fun and somehow can't anymore has baffled me for a while.

It has? To me it's clear as day. Being proactive rather than reactive takes more time and effort. As people get older and get more responsibilities, they have less time, and naturally default to a reactive rather than proactive stance in their hobbies more often than not. This means the decreasing pool of people that are proactive and can create come under increasing demand from the people that do not have the ability to do so to provide for the people that don't have the time or motivation to do it.

So I personally just think that systems need to foster and encourage proactive behavior that helps provide and nurture the kind of situations that people find more satisfying, otherwise they default to path of least resistance which is familiar social rp. I mean, I thought this was obvious.

@arkandel I've run a ton like that. The people that were gonna complain trend to grouse about the relative value of each part of the story and complain their own is not as big as they would like. You can be disingenuous and try to locally make it seem each part is more valuable than it really is but that is mostly delaying trouble than avoiding it.

@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.

@three-eyed-crow said in Spotlight.:

This is what's frustrating to me about this stuff, because these complaints are incredibly burn-out inducing when they're about the little things. Oh, there were complaints that a person took part in a game at my party? Whelp, I don't terribly want to run parties anymore, because clearly doing ANYTHING gets you flack. Yeah, this stuff is silly, but so much of it's ABOUT the silly stuff that it takes away from legitimate complaints about game balance and favoritism.

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.

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

Without getting into pseudo-sociology here, why is spotlight wanted - and in some cases, needed?

What I mean is, we're not really talking about entertainment at this point, or even giving people stuff to do. The issue isn't that a bartender has nothing to do - in fact in many cases it's easier for one to participate in plots, because they wouldn't need to answer questions such as "why would my High Lady be on a rowboat to catch a special rare fish" before they sign up. On a day to day basis a bartender can find scenes easier - they are already at a bar!

So what gives? Why are (some, and not just a few) folks driven to stand out by being assigned prominent positions?

For a lot of people it shows that the effort they put into the game actually mattered. It justifies the work they did, it's the pay off for everything they built towards. Other people are just as happy with numbers going up on a sheet, or numbers going up in some communal thing they are working on, whether that's a spaceship their character lives in, the amount of farms their noble lord has under their control, or the amount of ghouls under their vampire's control. It's about seeing dynamic change in a world that otherwise would be static, and that people -cannot do- in other RP environments.

Think about it. Players in MMOs roleplaying cannot show dynamic change in an environment, and for a tabletop, there's no way that dudes playing a different tabletop would ever know or care what you do. This is basically the only RP format that can essentially create IC celebrities. That's powerful.

@three-eyed-crow said in Spotlight.:

I feel like a lot of this comes down to the old issue of getting enough GMs/STs to support your players. You can try to mitigate some of this with encouraging player GMs and automating some stuff, but STs are always going to be the attraction to a story game, and demanding they do 100 things in 1 day is neither fair nor reasonable.

Yes and no. It certainly helps, but keep in mind we're talking about recognition and a spotlight, and not the ability to entertain people. Like you take gigantic sandboxes with a few hundred people that feel like it's actually 80 games of 4 people each that all happen to share the same grid. And the reason is that there's no person over PRP runners grabbing someone and making the entire game aware of them, and forcing recognition upon them.

What people care about is that it feels special and exceptional, more often than not. And the more it happens, the less a lot of them care about it. So say like we added 30 staffers, and gemits were a flood. People would no longer care about that, but then anytime I did a special vox hit or something, that people would go apeshit over.

This might be a subject I spend a good deal of time thinking about. I think every game runner should, since people wanting recognition is imo a very fundamental aspect of the draw of these games to many people, and one of the largest sources of conflict.

Let me list some of the challenges that aren't mentioned too explicitly I think already, that everyone should bear in mind.

1. People have extremely different desires about spotlight and recognition, some can be polar opposites, and staff can have very poor outcomes if they try to treat rewards evenly here. Some people -hate- public recognition, as it makes them actively uncomfortable. Other people have it as their single most important goal in games, and relentlessly pursue it. The ones that share that goal will often hate one another's guts.

2. Trying to define effort on the part of players and reward it accordingly is extremely difficult, and there will always be unfair outcomes if you do it on the basis. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but that you need to be aware of the limitations. For example, who contributes more to a game out of the following? One person that spends 40 hours a week running social events that entertain dozens of other players at a time, or one person that greets a few new players a month and helps them get settled and involved into the game, or someone that spends 10 hours designing a new fun system that is heavily used by everyone on the game, or someone that cheers up three disappointed players and defuses drama, or someone that keeps mostly to themselves but never creates problems and always looking to pitch into offscreen actions and helping to coordinate them, or an exceptional writer that's zero drama that everyone widely likes and makes every scene they enter more fun but has no expectations or desire for a spotlight? These aren't easy things to convert numerically into ratings for who should be 'up'.

3. Similarly, the format we have obscures effort by its very design. Even if staff constructed an orwellian hellscape that saw everything and recorded everything without exception, unless that game is tiny, absolutely no one would ever have time to parse through that. A huge amount of effort that people do will always be unrecorded, and things people invest their heart and soul into can be overlooked by accident incredibly easily. What's worse, players are acutely aware of their own effort, while also not seeing the effort of anyone else, which leads to a natural tendency for a huge amount of people to think their efforts are much higher relative to everyone else than than really are, and everyone else's are much lower. It is incredibly easy in a MU format for someone to think they are deserving and other people aren't and feel entirely justified in that. I would bet money that a ton of people here can think of cases where players locked in some dumb fight with one another all thought people on the other side were staff favorites, and they were the persecuted ones. The format encourages it.

That's just the baselines that people have to bear in mind and work around. People want really different things when it comes to recognition, that effort is extremely difficult to measure, and that even knowing when someone invests effort is very difficult.

I think for that reason, it usually is a good idea to have the methods for gaining recognition clearly accessible with identifiable tools to do so, and mostly grant recognition based on the use of those tools and participation in a much narrower scope that can be much more easily controlled.

I dunno I just don't think most of the tabletop games are really super well suited to persistent worlds with potentially hundreds of people interacting with one another. Some can do okay but it's a really different scope and I think anything being adapted should just bear that in mind.

@buttercup said in Buttercup's Playlist:

I am a bit relieved to be done with him in some sense. There is a large gap in immaturity where players associate characters with their players. I had seen a lot of it and understand this is a natural tendency for any medium like this. I took Tovell (the pious and dutiful knight) off the roster to sort of just compare experiences. I kept my use of him pretty much unknown and the difference in how I was treated as a player was amazing. Some of the same people that were crap OOCly to me with one alt were friendly, welcoming, and utterly different on the unstated alt. I enjoyed the OOC experience of playing a good-guy far far more.

In fairness to that, there's a marked difference between outright hostility ooc and just people being guarded, though. If someone is an antagonist, a lot of people just aren't comfortable being extremely communicative ooc because they feel they could be considered disingenuous if they then need to work contrary to you, or want to avoid ooc pressure over IC decisions. Anyone can be really friendly and chill when they know there is absolutely nothing at stake for doing so, and I tend to pay closer attention to the people that are that way when they know their own characters are at risk.

@ashen-shugar I personally might further divide it up into useful sub topics for social like, "How do you get involved in stories", "How do you handle conflicts you find oocly frustrating", "What are the differences between MU RP and other rp formats", etc. That might keep people's input more focused.

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.

@auspice My guess would be that in the logic where you define the variable, something else is causing it to consistently assigned a bad value, so I'd copy the code of where you are first assigning the variable and every case where it is modified.

@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.

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@faraday Ghost isn't the one displaying the entitled attitude at all.

That was in one of Nemesis' posts: "All you need to do is get this $120 router in order to allow this!" (which would allow them to play through the style of connection they are using, which the game owner did not want to do for reasons).

That crosses the entitlement line for me: "I want to use your freely offered thing, but I can't the way it is, so you go spend money so you can let me!"

It's pretty awful, really.

You shouldn't cite YouTube as evidence to contradict an article published by cisco.com and written by a CCNA, but for everyone who actually doesn't understand the technical aspects and why the former is much more accredited:

The admin at SR2064 thought that a perfectly valid IPv6 address issued by Arin to AT&T broadband was a "BOGON" because his router was so outdated that it didn't even know what an IPv6 address is. He and other inexperienced admin are also clearly unaware of the fact that if there were such a thing as a "BOGON" in the actual IT world (which I'm re-classifying as someone simply spoofing an IP Address, as that's what it actually refers to), the spoofer or BOGON transmitter still wouldn't be able to receive any responses back to their terminal because that "BOGON" wouldn't be routed to anywhere at all by anyone at all. This type of network trickery is used in DoS attacks, not in "identity obfuscation," and it takes someone lacking technical expertise in this related field to think that one guy connected to and playing the game from their home IPv4 would attempt a DoS attack using 1 or 2 spoofed addresses at the same time. I tried explaining to this admin, just like I've explained here, that nobody was spoofing IP Addresses or attacking his game - the problem is/was his outdated equipment. To classify this as "entitlement" on my part is unfair as I was correcting technical misconceptions.

Claims have been made about Cisco networking device defaults that are plainly disproved by Cisco documentation - not just in the first paragraph but in the article title itself.

From 2008 to around 2014 there actually may have been devices and even operating system updates providing IPv6 compatibility which left those compat functions/features disabled by default. This was never due to "security concerns" but due to the fact that IPv4 exhaustion was not quite complete by 2010-2012 and IPv6 was a brand new thing that wasn't actually in widespread use yet. Forwarding IPv6 requests to network servers that hadn't yet been updated to support it would have resulted in false connection errors and may have erroneously triggered automated blocking/banning protocols as a result. These false-flag positives in no way represented security holes, only issues that would have been difficult to troubleshoot and might have forced legit IT guys to have to update/upgrade equipment to support new OS features before the agency was really prepared for it. By 2017/18 it's safe to say that anyone who isn't IPv6-ready isn't providing any "services" worth consuming in the professional world, even if it would be absurd to apply the same standards to a hobbyist endeavor with no consistent standards or expectations of service.

FTFY to be appropriate to mildly constructive. It's a psychotic rage translator.

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

I guess it depends. Unlike Arx, most MU*s are pretty small. The idea of potentially alienating up to 10% of your already-small population seems like something many games would want to factor into their design decisions - even if that decision is ultimately "screw it, we're using email".

Yeah, I can understand that as a major concern. I think I should rephrase what I'm saying as, 'I think game runners worry too much about loud voices that have been in the hobby for eons, and it's a bigger danger to alienate a much larger base of players by trying to appease them'. If a game runner can appeal to both, no reason not to.

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Though I do think that many MUSHers are irrationally resistant to supplying emails. It takes sixty seconds to create a burner Gmail account for spam and even my mom has managed it. The entire internet runs off of email validation, and I seriously do not understand the resistance against it in MU-land.

So when I was getting started, I remember the violent reaction to what I thought wasn't a big deal, requiring an email to make registration fast and easy. People freaked out, so I was like, 'gosh, there must be a ton of MU players that won't use an email under any circumstances, even a throw away'. So I set up a special process to approve someone that was uncomfortable giving any email, spent a shitload of time on it.

Currently, I'm on character application #1809 on Arx and I've had to do that special process for the violently email-less exactly zero times.

I dislike people knowing what characters I'm playing because people RP with me dramatically differently when they know it's me behind the keys. I want sincere interactions in RP, not people being nice to me IC because they like me oocly. If I can create meaningful scenes that people get excited about, I want it to be on the basis of my RP alone.