Posts made by Apos

@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.

@Glitch Yeah, it was the costs in labor that made it look unrealistic to me. Sure if someone had an all volunteer staff, why not? But if people are talking about employing full time staff of multiple programmers, that is getting into a low ball estimate of a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in salary costs, and that bar seems super hard for a game of hundreds of people to leap over. Thousands maybe, but not hundreds.

@Entropy I think what you want is very admirable, and it's something most people would generally enjoy. I'd also be extremely surprised if you got any firm commitments in private messages offering to help or do anything for you.

I don't mean to say that to be discouraging. But I think if you want to build an ideal game, the hard reality is that you probably are going to need to do all the work and not so fun stuff yourself. If you want to launch a sandbox with almost no code, you can do that, but then in order to sell the game and make it popular and people will want to play there, you have to be such a good storyteller that people log in there to participate and give it a shot, and you have to go through the work of building an RP community yourself. Once it's established, people will be rolling in and you'd have to be the one still to then preserve the positive community you created. So you'll have a massive amount of work in building that great community, and then once people see it is great, you damned well will have a crazy amount of work in maintaining it. If you are selfless enough to say, 'I'm willing to devote a year or two of all my free time to make this work', people will love you.

But they probably won't help you.

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.'

@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.

@Ide said:

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

If you create micro-transactions for character mods, you still have a huge problem with them actually doing something with it. If it was a total sandbox with no GMs at all, and only PRP plots, it would work great, but what happens when the dude that dropped 500 dollars to have a thousand XP WoD character wants to have GM attention? Then it still comes back to trying to provide a service that requires GM man hours rather than automation, and that's a fundamental core game difference that makes it way harder.

On a very small scale, maybe, but as it increases massive numbers I think it either needs heavy automation (a MUD) or to change the game behavior that everyone relates with a MUSH.

@ThugHeaven said:

I'm not answering for Apos. I think people would pay for an extra dot, the problem is most people won't. It will create a disparity that the game itself just can't overcome. The people that won't pay will simply play somewhere else. That will leave the small group that did pay, who will inevitably demand more since they are paying. I don't think the mu*ing community is big enough to support the kind business model a pay to play game needs.

Micro transactions are actually super interesting. I forget the exact numbers, but it's something like only 2% of customers use them heavily, but they use them to a point where it just blows subscription models out of the water. So for financial viability you need to have either a large percentage of people that would go with a sub, or a really tiny percentage that have almost no upper boundary in what they spend. In that 2% of MMO players, there's a shocking amount of people that don't think much about plunking down thousands of dollars even if the other 98% wouldn't give a dime. It's funny that the industry never expected that, which is why they all started as subscription then they went to micro transactions once they realized, 'holy shit there's a few loons out there that are loaded!'.

But in a MUD, what a character can do is fundamentally limited by the code of the game. They can get items, they can kill all the monsters in the game, but they can't tactically nuke the game and make it end in an apocalypse. A MUSH, by its nature, is freeform. Sure they might pay through the nose to have characters, but they are still dealing with a GM to use that character who then has to make stories to suit them, which has the horrifying implication that basically every time the player wants to do something it's a customer service encounter where you are having an employee tell a customer they can't do something if it would impact other players in a way that would hit your bottom line. And if someone thinks they can manage that, man, hats off to them and I would probably pay money myself just to see it.

@Ide @GamerNGeek I think you guys might be overlooking the challenges inherent in monetizing a MUSH vs a MUD, the latter I think is very easy and straight forward, while the former is extremely difficult. There's a marked difference in the service provided and game between the two.

Okay, so if you try to monetize a MUSH, you have two options, you can go for a Subscription model, and/or you can go for a micro-transaction model which has just been shown to be vastly superior for massively multiplayer games due to the far higher upper end players are willing to spend. That's why virtually every MMO has gone f2p with micro-transactions. But what exactly do they charge for?

Well, for subscriptions, that's very simple, they charge for access to their game, with the understanding there will be a level of staff support to something that's otherwise presented as is. A MUSH could definitely follow a sub like that, if they presented themselves as a superior product, sure. But when you get to micro-transactions, which in my opinion is way more important than subscription models, that's where it falls apart.

Microtransactions in MUDs, MMOs, MOBAs all charge for largely the same thing. Some kind of modification for the service that is similar to what you could get if you invest more time in it, or a stylistic difference from similarly available things. IE unique appearance skins, items, and the like. These are all fully automated things. Once the designers invest the time into creating them, it's a flip of a switch. There is no resources whatsoever taken from the game, and even pay to win style games typically have a truly minimal effect on the world.

The same wouldn't be even remotely true for a MUSH.

Extremely little in MUSHes are truly automated. VERY little. Look at WoD mushes. I mean no disrespect when I say that, but they are tabletop simulators with extremely little coded systems, because they are usually way more about narrative and the interaction between people. Most have extremely little to separate their sandbox from a chatroom except for the format. So the single resource you can really give people are the time of GMs, and if you are monetizing that, you are talking about putting a price on human labor, and that gets VERY VERY expensive very fast. How much do any hotlines cost to pay them? -That's- what you'd be trying to do in microtransactions, and you'd be talking about a minimum of ten bucks an hour for a premium service. It's an entire order of magnitude difference from micro-transactions in MUDs

tl;dr, a MUSH needs to become more like a MUD to be financially viable.

I think it would be really challenging. For charity might work even though I think you'd have way more crazies than normal and the levels of entitlement would get astronomical, and I think that would make it crazy rough. Consider what most people complain about and want on a MUSH-

They really mostly want staff time, for GMing, for jobs, etc. If they are paying money, they'll have an expectation of higher service and that's not really sustainable, since unless you have a volunteer staff that probably outnumbers the playerbase, how do you deal with the people that are like, 'I want a tinyplot 4 hours long one time this week'. If you multiply that out by the player base and take it to its logical conclusion, it's impossible to meet that level of demand without some kind of automation which defeats what people want in a MUSH vs an RPI MUD. I think most staffing models for MUSHes is generally inherently flawed from a sustainability standpoint, and it would be compounded in one where the expectations increase.

So if it's for charity and you tell everyone, 'Well, sorry we can't really do more than a regular MUSH' you could do it but you'd probably have a lot of staff time devoted to shouting down entitled crazies who don't see it just isn't possible to meet their demand. Possible probably, but really not fun to run.

Zoolander reference.

I'm not emotionally invested in any feature at all, so when someone says it makes them feel uncomfortable even if I think it's just about inapplicable past experiences, I don't want to come off as condescending by saying, 'Yeah but I'm not a terrible human being so this time will be different'. I think with the amount of baggage a lot of long term players have regarding staff, it's hard not to swing to an extreme to put them at ease.

@Thenomain Yeah I was honestly shocked when I got pushback on it because I was like, 'Well shit, we have everything coded in Python and are using django, it's not hard to just have everything auto logged and save people the trouble, so why not. No more cleaning logs, people will love us.'

But I got nebulous, "It makes me feel uncomfortable. Dunno." "What if I make it so you have to specifically toggle it on from the start of an event?" "Yeah. Maybe. I dunno." So imo it's very much a gut feeling thing of anything automated seeming impartial and potentially submitting something they are embarrassed of, even if it's coded in a way that might make that effectively impossible. I think it's just an implied trust of other players versus something automated they have no reason to trust yet, but I think (hope?) it would go away after they try it.

@Lithium Yeah, I agree, and I thought that was pretty much the default and popular viewpoint of (OH YAY GM EVENT WOO) but no, it's really not universal at all. It's very much of a sandbox vs non-sandbox mentality that some people deeply resent GM intrusion in any scene they perceive as potentially controlled, was eye opening for me, and I don't know if you can please both groups at all. Some people like surprises, and some see it as an attack.

@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.

@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.

I had to think about this when building my own game and finding out that every single page ever made was logged permanently server side. On one hand, sure, that pretty much means he said-she said was never going to be a factor. But I decided to remove it entirely, simply because I think even if I was completely transparent about it, a lot of players would feel extremely uncomfortable about the lack of privacy.

I think staff has to cultivate an atmosphere of trust, and I think a lack of privacy/spying undermines it heavily.

Eh there's degrees. I don't really enjoy canon games that are set firmly on rails because I feel too much like a spectator forced to go along with a predictable plot where I know what is going to happen, and that's not really the same thing as wanting to wildly rewrite the game and change the theme and setting through PC action.

@Lithium I forget where it's hidden, but I remember I remapped the same feature in Potato to ctrl-p when I switched from SimpleMU to Potato, since the whole cycling through previous inputs is a big help.

@Sessurea To answer seriously I think there needs to be a fundamental drive to make grid RP meaningful and provide incentives for doing so, particularly when the game is not a sandbox and can have significant consequences for acting like a tool in public. I don't think the player bases of most MUs are all that different, but like if you take a sandbox where people can feel like they can say and do whatever they want in public, and take a side-by-side comparison with a game where you have social pressure that causes creepy players to feel alienated or punished if they show their creepiness, you see the proportion of players that would be incredibly creepy either stop playing or tone down their behavior.

I think this is more of the responsibility of staff to set the right tone and environment (positive reinforcement while weeding out truly disruptive elements), but if players are playing in a game where staff obviously does not care about it enough to enforce it, the most players can do is rp intentionally in public as a group and welcome strangers while continually vetting every new person that tries to join. That's excruciating and slow, and imo should never fall upon players to do this.

@Sessurea Yeah, and that's a depressingly common sentiment I've heard echoed a lot. I don't really think the demographics of MUs have changed at all, but the people looking for meaningful character development on a grid get elbowed out if there's not any kind of strong draw bringing people back there to have grid rp happen in an organic fashion. It's a really important design element that I think is dangerous to ignore, where staff can just shrug and say, 'whelp, up to players to get out there and make RP'.

@surreality I think you captured the amount of negativity and pessimism that sets up people for failure, where they are afraid of how delays look and lets it bait them into trading short term solutions that really box them in later. I think you really nailed how much very subtle pressure can get to creators.

I definitely could have launched 6 months ago if I did a standard MU install, plugged in a ton of available soft code and then was willing to just abstract GM a ton of things. But I really worry that saying, 'Well I can just GM that or do that by hand' is a huge trap if you know something could be automated and not have to become a +job every time. Sure, a bunch of things can't and shouldn't be, like stories, but I do think a lot of staff burn out from work that might have been preventable by earlier structure that never really got put in place.