Posts made by Apos

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

@faraday said in What drew you to MU*?:

The on-demand access to entertainment 24/7 is part of what sets it apart from other forms of online RPGs.

I've noticed, of late (ie the last... five or so years?), that the demand part of 'on-demand' seems to be more and more at the forefront of considerations for both players and game-runner-designers. Especially in the form of 'this game has to last forever because I want to keep doing this specific thing forever.' Is this sort of open-ended-sandboxy-thing something we should be encouraging, or working away from?

I'd just say that the #1 consideration of most people in the hobby is that their time is respected, and they are extremely averse to investing it anywhere where they think that won't be the case.

@three-eyed-crow said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@apos
Whenever I've seen staff talk about their intentions behind a system, you guys do seem to be putting these things out with the hope they'll foster rp/story rather than ooc casino grinding. I appreciate that and it's what makes me continue to engage with the game, even though I'm a player who prefers more lightly-coded environments. I am super curious how domain is going to be balanced/what steps you guys have in mind to keep it from being a deep dive into accounting for any minister position, but it shall be what it shall be.

I can speak in very general terms about this, with nothing set in stone, specifically about the kind of RP people enjoy so what the goals would be.

Now for some players, being able to build something and have a sense of ownership over what they are building and seeing lasting results reflected in the game world is the biggest draw for them. These will be players that sometimes care way, way, way more about seeing the results of their actions on their houses and domains than they would about their own characters, and some players like that would be super invested even in a relatively simple coderun (like much the same players that get excited about work/invest). Being able to conquer things in an automated way and expand domains would be a huge appeal for a lot of players.

For others, it's more the feeling of customization, like people go nuts about talking about the types of materials offered in their domain and tradegoods, and what makes them special, and being able to build a new school or training facility or port or pilgrimage place or whatever in their domain, even if there's no coded effect, is a really big deal. And any kind of coded effect just amplifies that appeal.

Now for the biggest group, and the ones that I think are left most hungry at the moment by as it stands since it's something we don't offer, are being able to tell stories and being able to RP about consequence. it just is not interesting to people to have Nameless Vassal #1 and Nameless Vassal #2 paying taxes week after week, with a clearly mechanical, automated way. Seeing the effects of their actions, good or bad, which then has an impact on others and creating opportunities or crises that turn into Major Things is a huge appeal and what many people mean when they talk about politics in games, and needing to maneuver the many different divergent and overlapping goals of a ton of different factions. This also is the most dangerous one if it's implemented poorly, since it can antagonize people or make them unbelievably stressed, but also the one that would be far and away the most rewarding and offer people the largest possibility to tell stories and create large scale organic reactions from their own actions.

There's overlap in the different groups but it's a lot of different things to balance, since sudden crises can really frustrate the people that just enjoy seeing a number go up in a domain, while complete stability can squeeze out the potential to create story.

@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.

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Part of the reason for that is because the 'You must be this tall to ride' sign on a lot of these mechanics is pretty damn tall. Anything less then perfect or near perfect stats is going to see a dramatic drop to less then a quarter of the results the people with perfect stats are getting.

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.

@three-eyed-crow said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

I don't concern myself much with the Arx economy because it seems so ephemeral right now, and I kind of expect MU/MMO economies to be bloated and broken to some degree. I am kinda eyeing it apprehensively with an eye to how it'll impact whatever domain systems are put into place, though. Is your House going to be impoverished and your peasants miserable because you aren't sufficiently grinding the mini-game? I doubt it, as that's not the ooc mentality I've encountered from staff, but I feel a little guilty on the weeks I can't invest grind on my noble as it is, with the impacts as only what they are.

Double post but important. No. It's too important to not make people feel they are penalized if they don't engage, or worse, that inattention is punished. It's a terrible gaming philosophy that games do to foster an addictive, 'can't afford to not play' mentality that I find unethical in freemium games and I would never do that.

So it would be about having a healthy baseline that feels 'okay' when left alone, and trying to make fun minigames that only create possible consequences when you engage with it, so that people that enjoy it deal with possible crises that hopefully are fun, and people that could not possibly care about the minigames never need to think about it.

@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@pyrephox Yes. I don't honestly find this kind of display very constructive, because the projected margin is so slim it's in 'who gives a damn' territory, but is presented in a way that all but begs for interpretation by people who don't want to math out the systems as "oh no if I don't do this right I am at a big disadvantage".

I agree with this and I want to chime in here that I feel that a lot of mechanical discussion can be kind of misleading.

From my experience, a lot of 'this is an inefficiency, and will surely create problems' usually don't exist because an analysis of numbers only miss out on overwhelming contextual reasons that would otherwise prevent them. When I intentionally create huge incentives for something, and more people talk about how it is OP than actually engage with it and use it, that's worrying for entirely different reasons. Like as an example, there was 11 modeling coderuns since the assembly. There's was nearly a thousand separate uses of 'praise' last week. I'm certain without checking there was far, far, far more uses of 'work' than that.

So from a macro perspective, the analysis would be like, 'modeling has a lot of pain points that make it vastly underused and need to be tweaked' and that there's a lot of issues with the resources work generates compared to other incomes. And from a systems discussion, people kind of poking at the furthest edge cases alienates people from experimenting with the common, more rewarding common cases and is actively counter productive imo.

ETA because I know someone will ask- no, that's a thousand separate uses of the praise command, not individual praises. IE, someone doing 'praise/all' is counted as 1 in that thousand-ish count.

@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.

@faraday said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

I agree , when expressing discomfort or dissatisfaction is used to try to "win" and get your way.  But I think you can have situations where that isnt the case (which is what I assumed Faraday meant) and so if you want to negotiate and are up for that ooc, starting off with "change or leave" may not be the best approach.  Because that can and does trigger people who would have perhaps worked with you to find something more agreeable or mutually agreed upon to just say "ok then, bye."

Its like starting off a disagreement or annoyance with your spouse or partner by throwing in a "we can just divorce or break up then!"

Yeah that's what I was trying to get at. Maybe my example wasn't the best.

Yeah like I get that this is more the root of why a lot of people are reluctant to say something. A lot of times, they like the RP except for X happening, and aren't sure if they can politely ask about X without offending the other person and losing the entire RP dynamic. I get that, and I don't think there's great answers. But I would encourage everyone to go on the assumption the other person is reasonable. If they aren't reasonable, and they don't respond to a very gentle, very polite, very respectful nudge, then it's probably a time bomb and as much as it sucks to lose that, it's still probably better off.

@packrat said in Automated Adventure System:

One piece of advise regarding magical items that boost stats.

Please resist the temptation to have items that boost a stat but do so 'secretly' so that 'nobody can work it out'.

I can guarantee that if you make a ring (or a nipple ring) that gives +1 Luck but does not announce this then that mostly means that its secret powers will only be unlocked by assholes who are willing to equip items then +roll three hundred times in their bedroom before loading the results into a spreadsheet and comparing to the unassisted statistics.

It would probably result in a subset or clique of players who do that kind of thing and fairly rapidly know the precise stats of every magical item they retrieve whilst other people flail blindly and feel useless.

lol, man, not that I would, but AS that kind of player in my youth, I can guarantee you that if I didn't want someone to figure out a formula they would never, ever, ever figure out that formula.

@derp said in RL Anger:

Alright, well... cool then? I mean, by all means, stop trying to help educate women on how to protect themselves from predatory behavior because it puts too much onus on them to take responsibility for their own safety. Let me know how that works out, I guess?

I mean I guess if your take away from Matthew Shepard was 'don't take rides from strangers'.

@derp said in RL Anger:

Do we think that rapists don't know that rape is bad? Or that putting a headline in a newspaper somewhere between 'Hey, it would be super nice if...' and 'Knock it the fuck off...' is gonna somehow deter them from doing so?

I mean, there's not an insignificant percentage of dudes that think that unless someone is holding a screaming person down by knife point, it doesn't count. We aren't exactly that far away from a congressman talking about 'legitimate rape'. There's a whole lot of people that think a drunk person flirting with them and seeming to be okay with something at first isn't raping them, and I mean, it just is.

So yeah, actually. A lot of rapists don't know rape is bad.

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.

I will nonetheless try:

Real-Time Play By Post

I have used this description to great effect to people who don’t know what a Mu is.

That's a good description but that wasn't what I was getting at. You could say, 'well it's another chat type way of RPing' and that also works, but it doesn't capture why MUs are really, really good at what they do. Like let me give an example.

Say you're trying to run a consistent world like you have in a MU, even ones that might be a sandbox with a ton of characters are running around, and you have a hundred players doing this, and they are all in four different formats: a MU, a PBP forum, a freeform MMO sandbox, and googledocs/discord/some other chat.

Of those four, MUs are the only one that has the ability for players to automatically update the state of play of the game and change it on their own. Like a PBP game might have say, a forum with character sheets, and people edit them, or a MMO sandbox might have an off game forum with some kind of number tracking, or google docs or discord might have someone acting as a GM... but all of those are unbelievably clunky and fall apart incredibly easy as the numbers of players grow. Most of those games have no more uniformity between them than MUs have with each other. People in large PBP forums flat out have no idea what is happening in other parts of the game, and it diverges quickly and there's no attempt to reconcile continuity because it becomes impossible to do so. MMO players won't even try because they can't effect the game environment in a permanent way so its inherently a sandbox and the communities all are fine with handwaving everything and doing spontaneous RP that has no impact past the immediate scene. Google doc, discord, slack, all of that falls apart outside of the immediate group in close coordination with one another.

A MU is the only format that does a large world well, in my opinion. And there's almost no way to tell people about this, because the kind of big world game that's coherent and unified doesn't exist in other formats. So they don't know what's missing, and all it sounds like is more of the same with a different (and worse) interface until they try it. Saying "It's Real-Time Play By Post" would make someone go, "cool, but why should I switch?" And I'd say it's because we have a format that allows for bigger stories, and a real sense of consequence on the game world and meaning in those stories that other formats have trouble duplicating.

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats. We keep larger worlds consistent and coherent with a unified pay environment, that most PBP and freeform chat environments just can't do outside of their immediate circle of friends. And until someone gets swept up into a big story, most won't even see the appeal, let alone why they should struggle through a terrible, archaic and ugly format.

I agree with most of the posts, but it might just be easier to try to think of concepts in terms of, "How am I going to make this character fun for other people to interact with?" Especially with an unlikable character, it is important to nail that. If you do, people will want to RP with you, if you don't, they won't. So I think it's pretty simple.

@tinuviel said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

@apos said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

Saying 'this game will have a one year run' probably means it is effectively dead by month five, since no one will want to join a game that's half over.

True, but again that's not what I said. Every story has an ending, so too should every game. Go out with a bang than with a whimper. Games will die, regardless of staff's wishes, though 'people not joining' isn't at all the same as a game being dead.

That is true but it is an unbelievably bad idea to explicitly state this. An overwhelming majority of players in the hobby are invested in the illusion of permanence. It is a core component of why they play these games, and why they choose this RP format compared to others that do not have any sort of environmental permanence. Undermining that will absolutely gut a game's playability. Yes, every game will end. Telling them when it will end ensures it will taper off well before that, unless every player involved was invested in the premise from the start, which will also make it very niche.

It is functionally the same as saying to players, "Don't worry, nothing you do matters at all in game. Have fun!" Someone can do that and if they find success with it, more power to them, but I do not think it is a good idea. This only works if something is being presented afterwards, like reboots and new stories that someone can look forward to, and even then it has tough issues. I must recommend against ever explicitly stating an end to a game, if someone intends for it to be a healthy environment well before that.

@tinuviel I don't disagree but this hobby is full of flakes. Any implication that a game runner is not incredibly dedicated is basically a red flag for anyone debating whether or not they want to invest time in the game. They generally won't if they think they'll do more work than the head staffer and see their investment evaporate due to someone else's flaking. Ie this thread.

Saying 'this game will have a one year run' probably means it is effectively dead by month five, since no one will want to join a game that's half over.

@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.

@wizz Dude don't worry, if other people like the game they'll have the self-absorbed eulogies on lock down. Going gentle into that good night is probably not going to be a thing.

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.

Ten people having a blast is in my opinion more successful than two hundred people that are utterly miserable.