Posts made by Apos

@Coin said in Fanbase entitlement:

@FiranSurvivor said in Fanbase entitlement:

I think in the realm of MUSHing players can be more entitled (deservingly I believe) because of the time and effort spent in the game.

Comparing an entitled player on a MU* to a fan of a TV show is apples and oranges.

There is a much tighter and more intimate social contract involved in playing on a MU then there is sitting on your couch once a week and watching a show, or reading a book. While there are obviously investments involved with the two latter, I dont believe the investment is as intricate or intimate as the former.

I disagree entirely. I spend more dedicated time watching TV or reading than I do RPing at this point. Also, my choosing to invest in something does not, actually, entitle me to anything regarding that thing, regardless of how much I choose to invest.

I get what you're saying, but if you take that to the logical conclusion then it would be okay for people to take advantage of others' work on MUs. I don't think any of us would disagree that is a bad thing to do, so I'd say there's a difference between contributions when it's basically asked for and just doing something alone in a sandbox of their own investment, and MUs really blur the line between the two.

@tragedyjones said in Bump In The Night: A Chronicles of Darkness MUX:

I don't know what everyone else's definition of sandbox is, but, to me, from a design standpoint (and I was there for at least, like, 20% of the design process), BITN was designed to be a venue for telling horror stories. I've worked on games that aimed to provided a simple sandbox (RenoMUSH being a prime example). BITN was not that.

It might make an interesting topic since I suspect that a lot of us use the term in different ways. For me, I think of a sandbox as when stories can exist in complete isolation, and things that could reasonably effect other characters on the grid don't even if their characters would know/react to it. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, just a different style.

@Thenomain said in RL things I love:

@Misadventure said in RL things I love:

@surreality said in RL things I love:

I am keeping the shit out of "you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max" forever.

I prefer Swiftian principles.

Straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked satire, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.

An immodest proposal.

@surreality Glancing at that link, one piece of commentary about Anne Rice's explosion jumped off the page at me:

"I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so."

That sounds very uncomfortably close to our hobby here.

Anyone that takes staff for granted like that generally are the same people that would never ask themselves, "This character concept/plot/RP is fun for me, but is it fun for anyone else to interact with?" I just don't understand. If the person making a character wouldn't want to interact with it, how can they expect anyone else to want to do so in a collaborative storytelling environment?

@Ganymede Hey, you know as well as I do that Ohio has Licking County.

@surreality Yeah, that's how I pretty much see it, and I'm not really in love with the terms alpha/beta (I feel kind of pretentious using them), but I think it is helpful to give people an idea of what I'm doing and try to let them decide how comfortable they are playing in a game in an early state. Like if someone isn't comfortable with major systems coming in and their work possibly poofing or being completely changed a week later, I can't blame them for not wanting to play under those conditions and preferring to wait for it to be more settled in beta/release, but other people have a lot of fun with testing and breaking all the things and just shrug off anything being changed.

Tying into the rest of the thread, I think probably the biggest single source of conflict in the hobby is just people feeling like their time/effort isn't respected, whether they are a staff or player. So with that in mind, I figure I or anyone else running a game has to be really, really, really careful with making sure they don't ever give anyone the wrong idea where they think all their hard work is for keeps when it is potentially transitory.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

I used to have people page me out of the blue and ask if they could masturbate for me on Skype on my Reno staff login, no joke. I was in a whole world of: "I don't know you from a hole in the ground and just did an app for you, I... where is this even coming from?!" (Even my chars were a bitchy artist and a dorky folklorist, so it's not like I had a pile of TS-bait chars or something to suggest that's what I was there for.)

In my heart of hearts I want to believe they were immediately site banned. I want to believe. I really do. I don't get how behavior that if someone did that to a clerk in a gaming store would likely get their ass kicked becomes 'well, shrug it off, the creeper will go away on their own. What can you do, the internet amirite' in a MU.

@surreality I could see an alt limit of one per region in a game of the style you're thinking of. It would probably actually reduce the amount of freezing-switching as people didn't feel they needed to shelve alts to participate in different RP, if the areas are going to be distinct and difficult to interact with aside from that.

I tend to ask myself three questions, when thinking about attempting to generate activity, create events or RP for people. But this also really is about just creating the overall systems that people then make their own fun with.

1. Is it easy to be involved, without feeling any particular IC or OOC barriers that prevent involvement?
2. Once involved, do they personally feel engaged in a way that's compelling?
3. Once complete, did they feel it was a rewarding experience?

@Ominous Yeah brief outage, back up now.

@Griatch I've seen two definitions, the one you've quoted and this other one- "a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen." Which would mean text games are not considered video games, since there's no imagery to manipulate.

I think that one is more what most people on the thread are thinking of, since if you go by the video device one, that kind of invites in things that could be played independent of video devices, like say, two friends playing cards against humanity over skype would be a video game by that definition, since they would be playing a game over a video device, or two friends joking around by texts could be considered of video games. I think most people think of the visual medium with imagery to manipulate as intrinsic to the game.

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

Arx is using a rather old fork of Evennia, no? You guys have a lot on your plate but you should port to the latest release IMO.

Yeah, I absolutely agree and it's something we've talked about a good bit and it's on our to-do list, though unfortunately we made some changes that make a port over an extremely difficult and time intensive project (which is something I still kick myself over). A port over will still happen, since it can only make life easier in the future after it's done, so I think we'll do it as the next big project after the empire-building type systems have a basic functionality that people can play with.

@Groth That one is incredibly infuriating, and it has to be on our end and not the user end, but man that behavior is so damned weird. There must be an error somewhere deep in where it handles sessions I figure, or some weird kind of concurrency issue, since it seems like some sessions it just fixes on for a while and has a problem with and maybe randomly ignores keep alives. I used to get DC'd quite a bit in the same way on my staff bit, while guests I was working on would be fine. It only effects a few accounts at a time, and then seems to change which ones, which is so incredibly bizarre. We'll find it eventually, and I'm really sorry for how annoying it is in the meantime.

@ixokai Conversations about code bases shouldn't give me feels.

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

I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.

I very, very strongly agree. I'm generally finding that most things are way easier in a web format, and we do want to support that, absolutely. I'm not at all satisfied with the current implementation it's not intuitive and difficult to use, and the walk-through guide that I'm going to do will really just be a stop gap until it gets cleaned up.

One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.

That's something we've spent time talking about, and there's basically 4 different points that characters and organizations can accumulate things meaningfully and I think each has their own different approaches.

For Prestige, the social score, that's not really played up very much at present since we don't have the displays for it be near as visible as they will ultimately, but I imagine that'll eventually be a mini-game a lot of players enjoy. The trick there is we're going with percentage weekly decay, and flat+percentage losses on prestige hits, while only flat gains. So the idea there is as the base values increase higher they become increasingly unsustainable, and it'll tilt towards the players and organizations most invested in spending heavily to counteract decay and stay famous and dip away from anyone that loses interest. But at lower levels steady passive expenditures will keep increasing until they hit the point where the decay outpaces the flat gains.

I think of Dominion assets in a broad single category, since it'll cover holdings, the economic/social/military resources, influence level, agents, troops and so on. I think much like before there's two means to undercut the dinosaur effect, in that both most things are consumable in that they are consumed to yield a certain effect (which isn't reflected yet, but say social resources in order to influence a coded outcome), that acts as an incentive against hording or at least minimizes its impact. And secondly, to put a real cost on maintaining higher levels of growth which much like prestige acts as a push back against the highest tiers. But I think this particular point will become clear as we add in the systems where the points are spent, in that they aren't yet, and it'll probably be hard for characters to justify holding onto them versus the things they can do with them.

Similarly silver, I feel that the sinks are really where we counteract any gluts, and so far it looks good from that angle. I think we need to have several hundred times more capital income before the rare things would be considered commonplace, and that's ignoring them leaving the system through destruction/idled out removal. Still it's definitely something to watch, but I'm happy with it as long as it reinforces some feelings of scarcity that can drive RP.

Of the four, players would probably be most concerned about xp in the long term sense, since it's most relevant to their experiences from WoD games where huge dinosaur characters dominate everything. That's a very understandable concern. And I'm very open to catch up mechanics, and certainly have considered a few, though I'm not sure any are necessary just yet for a few mitigating reasons. I'm against lifetime xp carrying over vs unspent, since I think this tends to worsen the feeling of mass xp inflation, as it becomes more associated with stronger older players rather than just older characters, and is otherwise partly kept in checking with older characters being rostered/retired/etc. On one subtle but very distinct difference, xp totals and skills aren't as deterministic of character value in similar ways to systems like WoD, in that say in those systems every aspect of a character can be summarized with xp spends like in backgrounds. In Arx that doesn't really follow, in that a character with base stats/skills that happens to possess extreme political power could be overwhelming in the impact they have on the play environment compared to a commoner that has the greatest combat stats on the grid. That's the reason we give such a large xp bonus to creation of lower social ranks, in that it's disproportionate how characters in royal/noble social ranks have influence, and I'd rather counterbalance that with higher skills that make commoner characters much more effective specialists at their areas of expertise. That said, it definitely is a concern, and yeah I could definitely see us scaling starting xp in response if the average creeps too much, but I think 'too high' is a much higher baseline than in WoD by comparison so it might take a while for it to feel as similarly impactful/overwhelming to the play environment.

Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.

Oh I greatly appreciate that, and Tehom would for sure. It might be a little bit before we can enlist anyone, since almost all changes happening right now are backend that would make frontend changes a bit confusing (just about everything is being done in bootstrap off django, jquery, etc). Tehom will probably start asking for help when it gets closer to the point of others being able to pitch in.

I'm happy with how a couple of the major systems have been going in testing, and ideally they'll reflect on the web site soon. I intend to do write ups about them shortly and guides for how they'll work, but I've been extremely pleased with how much RP they've been generating in alpha and how they are working out so far.

The Journal system. I like there to be a heavy emphasis on asynchronous IC communication for how immersive it is, but I find a lot of other benefits. For anyone with limited time that can't do scenes I believe it tends to let their characters stay involved, meaningfully contribute to decision making, and engage in limited role-playing. But the biggest benefit is probably the amount of continuity it supports and how much it emphasizes interconnected stories. I look forward to it going on the website, so even someone not playing the game but vaguely interested in it could still following along the story can do so. Not anything revolutionary, but something that people more used to p2p and similar formats could probably sink their teeth into, even if the emphasis on interconnected stories diverges from the goals of the other formats except maybe tumblr.

Tasks I've been pleased with so far, in the most basic sense as an abstract representation of characters' influence off grid or during downtime. Though @groth has a very fair point that quite a bit is being developed as we go. I do have strong opinions about where we end up, in terms of having a vision, though I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing to refine mechanics throughout- I worry about laying out something specific and sticking to my guns come hell or high water kind of invites the game developing in an aberrant path away from things I originally envisioned and thought would be fun, which are a lot more abstract. Like right now, I think the answers I'd have to those same questions would be understandably unsatisfying for a lot of more hardcore mechanical players, since it'd be more like:

Combat should be long enough to feel satisfying, and never long enough to be boring. Armor should be variable enough so there's no clear cut best option in all circumstances, to encourage more players pursuing different options that they feel best suits their characters. Expensive materials should be a clear cut advantage, but not overwhelming that it feels unbeatable... And so on. And I realize having things in that vague of terms is disappointing to people that really enjoy crunching numbers and having an extremely firm grasp on mechanics, but I think refinement through some testing is unavoidable to avoid painting ourselves in a corner with systems we aren't really satisfied with.

Though yeah I agree, having a clearer end point rather than more vague general goals would be a lot more efficient.

@GamerNGeek said in Chime's MOO thread:

Lots of projects over the years have not thrived because of that simple truth. Hell, I once was on a Mush where I wanted to do something as simple as replace the "+" in +commands. Make it so "+finger" was just "finger" and "+where" was just "where". I got SO many complaints it was unbelievable. So the old + versions went in as aliases. I kept my new, but kept the old too, and people seemed okay with it.

Yeah, I've been aliasing basically everything to try to capture as many different MU syntaxes, though the truth is there's so many different conventions it's pretty hard to catch them all. Some commands have like five different aliases.

We'll probably have a bit more play between the website (which isn't anywhere close to done) and the game itself as time goes on. Code-wise, since the website uses the same database as the game, it's easy and intuitive to have being logged into the website and being logged into the game mean pretty much the same thing, and update on one side automatically reflects upon the other. This lets us try some neat things, like character journals that can go in a searchable format, webs of character relationships, a timeline like history for characters so they can see their individual character milestones and how it relates to the ongoing development o the metaplot.

We'll probably push into beta when most of those story systems are done, the different organizations have more fleshed out coded means to gain and use their resources, and NPC agents controlled by players are more fully defined.

A lot of people are reminding me lately why MUs can be an amazing medium. I think the reason so many people burn out, become cynical and get jaded in the MU format is just how much effort someone can really invest in creative writing when they get excited about it, and then feel like all their effort is dismissed or taken advantage of. People get burned like that, and hesitate to ever do it again, and who can blame them?

But man, running a new game and having complete strangers decide to take a chance and just pour their hearts into it, seeing all the work they invest and the amount of fun they have, it's hard to think of a more fulfilling medium. You guys are goddamned incredible sometimes.