Posts made by Apos

Any game owner has to choose whether they want to obscure any information on their setting for story purposes, knowing full well that if they do so, they will be accused of favoritism and stuff like that down the road. You just will. If players try to do something and don't understand why it doesn't work, and if explaining it would cause gigantic reveals that spoil major plotlines, there's just no option but to sit there and have a ton of people talk about how bad and unfair you are. And if you have a completely transparent game, where everyone knows everything about the setting, you really lose a core appeal that is the heart of why some people (by no means all), play these games. Staff just have to decide if they want a living, more full fleshed world that has things to discover, and are willing to take some really unfair punches for it.

Like let me give an example.

Say someone creates a setting that is set on earth, and is seemingly post apocalyptic with very limited information about why. A deliberately obscured past, history eradicated, that kind of thing, with players starting to piece together what happened. Some find out that the few cities they are left in might have been part of an intergalatic empire, though they just don't have anything like interstellar space travel yet.

Now, some players are really captivated by the mystery of this and are chasing down storylines about it. Some REALLY want the achievement of their characters being admired by the first ones to do interstellar travel again, and are super hungry about that. What they don't know is that ships are not the limiting factor here, because of the Giant Angry Space Slug that eats anything that tries to go past Jupiter, or the Impenetrable Ring of Space Fortresses created by the alien civilization that reduced mankind back to earth that destroy anything leaving the solar system, vaporizing anything that comes close.

So players that REALLY want the achievement of getting interstellar travel ask, 'So will we be able to leave the solar system soon?' and as staff you say, 'That's likely not happening anytime soon'. They grouse but they don't touch it.

Meanwhile, the players super wrapped up in story, find out about abandoned moon bases, and want to check out the moon base, and build a rocket to do it. Just to the moon and back, so this won't go by the Giant Angry Space Slug, and this definitely won't go by Ring of Space Fortresses. Just to the moon.

The latter category of players will freak the fuck out. They will say up and down how mean and unfair staff is, and how ridiculous it is that group A is building a rocket to go the moon, when they were very clearly told by staff that interstellar travel wasn't happening anytime soon. Months of complaints on discord, constant whispers about staff can't be trusted, etc, etc.

A lot of people are like, 'well why didn't you just let people build a rocket and die to the space slug, or correct this', and that's really missing the point. Those people definitely aren't going to be any happier if their characters die. They are after the achievement and admiration of their peers. Being a warning to others is a thing they hate way way way more than staff bias, and they would call it mean staff anyways if their characters died. The whole reason they asked oocly if it was possible was to avoid looking bad by trying and failing.

And it's annoying but it doesn't matter. The people that are invested in story will appreciate it, and going full transparent to appease a group of people that just don't enjoy games the same way just makes for games that don't take any risks to entertain people that deserve it. I think staff just has to be willing to deal with people that gripe that don't engage in the same way.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeah. Anyways, as was just thankfully illustrated, there's wildly different expectations for what is fine, and that's a problem. Like, some people are just going to see sexualization as inherently part of theme and don't think it's a big deal. Some aren't comfortable with it, but their friends might be like, 'Naw man it's a political game, don't worry about it', and then find that the political meetings are happening in the middle of a bondage club that has an orgy going on. And that might cause just a little bit of friction.

Creeps generally are all about taking advantage of ambiguity, and if there's okay'd sexualization of scenes in public RP then it's better to have more clarity that can't be taken advantage of by the super creepy.

@haven said in Let's talk about TS.:

Is this thread here so we can see shit posts and decide OOCly who we would never fuck ICly?

Because right now, I will never TS any of you!

That worries me way, way, way less than the opposite. 'You made some solid points there. I'd now like to TS you'. Wait what.

In trying to draw it back to topic, I think there's a startling lack of awareness (real or feigned), that being sex positive does not mean forcing expectations on anyone else, and that everyone determines their own comfort levels for what they want to deal with. Drawing something into a public spectacle would be disastrous for anyone that is not comfortable speaking about it, and is similar to pressuring someone in a way that's clearly not okay.

@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:

@roz said in Let's talk about TS.:

This whole scenario will just end up in game-wide civil wars and terrible toxicity the first time there's any sort of disagreement among the playerbase.

I'm sure they said something similar about having democracies instead of kings. Giving up control is always a horrible, unthinkable idea to people who have power.

Ya but pretty much every single person that replied are players rather than staffers, so they are the powerless in your analogy, and think your idea is awful.

@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:

@roz

Can you be more specific? Why is it a horrible idea?

Why would you wish to reward someone being disruptive to the play environment with a public spectacle with which that they can further disrupt the play environment?

@carex I think there's a bit of correlation rather than causation there though, and that being a result of a power imbalance rather than the cause of it. In a world where someone can just straight up murder someone with magic, it might develop differently.

I don't think it's a big deal to say, 'nah not doing this', and just quietly nudge off anyone who wants to argue 40 different ways why it should be his fetish game.

@faraday I don't think it would stay that way or that it is unlikely that players would adopt whatever is the norm. That is more what I was getting at.

@faraday said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

@ominous said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

@faraday For me it depends on the culture of the game. If there are no emits then people can set however they like, changing the time and the weather. If there are emits, the time and weather is what the server says it is. Don't make sets that disagree with it.

That's a fine theory. The reality is that people just don't do that. Time, weather and ambiance emits are at best treated as an inconsistently-applied guideline because it's annoying when your RL schedule only allows you to be on during the IC middle of the night (or middle of the workday), or you can't get people together for a RP scene because the weather isn't cooperating, or it takes 3 RL hours to do a scene that only lasts 30 minutes IC but +time says otherwise, or ... the list goes on and on.

That has not held true in my experiences. This is stylistic and cultural that is specific to MUSHes, not to MUs in general. On games I played that had a high amount of them, players just don't set the same way because they treat the environmental messages as the a shared accepted norm for what the reality is, and only wrote about things outside the scope that would already be defined.

Basically, players treat the game world as another player. In so much that you don't metapose and say what another player is doing, they just don't do it in any way that would contradict the game world. I did not run into elaborate scene-sets until I played a MUSH for that reason. I think of it as just an entirely different RP style, not one that's better or worse, but it definitely exists, and it's one I think of a lot when some RPI players try a MUSH and are very confused because cues just don't exist and there is so, so, so much more handwaving that can be very offputting since they aren't sure what's valid and what's not.

@wildbaboons said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@apos Is Tehom willing to make that more public? I know you'd mentioned it as a dream before but it'd be awesome if the core stuff was made available (the where, bbs, mailing, etc)

Yes, definitely. The problem is that the different commands aren't really in discrete modules that can be broken off very well, and giving everything with the API keys would be really really bad, so it all needs to be refactored and sanitized to be able to make it safely public. That's more of an organizational problem than anything though, so if someone was like, 'so how did you code X' then he could just manually copy and paste that particular stuff and someone might be missing some dependencies but nothing they couldn't work around, I think. Or I could do it, I have the repository also, and I'm happy to if he gives the okay.

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

• Pour through Arx-code graciously shared by @Tehom.

Teamwork makes the dream work.

I think we might be veering away from something constructive, and I think we can talk about the positions in ways that don't come across as attacks. Let me see if I can restate a couple things so I understand them, and I apologize if I don't get them quiet right.

So we want to have extremely detailed documentation and rules so that don't let new players that aren't aware of the many unspoken rules of the hobby aren't misled, and don't fall into offputting new player traps that make them have a bad first experience with the hobby and alienate them.

And we also want to avoid having extremely excessive rules that make staff members feel restricted and unable to make common sense calls, and get overburdened with detail that could limit their ability to make sound decisions. The latter is more in the spirit of this thread, since if we're going to reward people, that kind of transparency can reduce headaches in people feeling treated fairly.

And the trick is reconciling those two, does that sound right?

@thenomain said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

But I've also coded similar systems all throughout WoD and people almost never get so touchy about them as they do with this.

People that have paid their dues in learning something unnecessarily complicated tend to be very protective of that. This makes for extremely unhealthy environments as it effectively encourages hazing of new players rather than helping them, and is particularly true of more competitive rather than collaborative environments. See RPI muds, where understanding the internal game mechanics gives someone a competitive advantage, for example. Another example are complaints about games being dumbed-down when they are changed to be made more accessible, even if the original system was inscrutable or just plain bad.

I kinda hate weighing in at length on this because it's easy for people to be rude and insult the work someone has put into a system by denigrating it. So I want to emphasize that while people can subjectively prefer one thing, I think there needs to be a lot of courtesy while expressing any kind of value judgments.

Like I don't think there is anything at all wrong with going with a very minimalist, RP purist approach with a laser focus on story, and feeling that anything besides that is a distraction. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's wrong, just different.

I feel that I can try to accommodate things I personally have no interest in without it disrupting or devaluing the things I do enjoy, but someone that doesn't want to do that is not wrong, they should not feel obligated to try to do that.

@arkandel I believe it helps a game if the game is designed to reward the behavior that helps cultivate the kind of environment that the owners want to see.

Sure, it doesn't have to. Players can do the same kind of behavior regardless. But I think it makes for a much more consistent buy in, and this is important because negative experience tend to greatly outweigh positive ones for players.

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

Can finger-pointing also not take place in this section though? It's not a matter of cursing at people or anything like that, but I'd rather we look at problems to solve rather than for people to blame.

The former might actually produce solutions, the latter only tends to generate distractions.

The problem there is while someone like Faraday is legitimately looking for civil discourse, other people aren't. They are feeling stung over discussions they felt turned against them and hoping the moderators will change things to get even, and posting about cabals or whatever, when what happened is they posted something dumb and half the board told them it was dumb. If someone posts something misogynistic or transphobic or whatever, I mean, a lot of posters are going to tell them they disagree, and whether that's justified outrage or an unhealthy dogpile pretty much depends on where you sit. And it really is up to the mods how much they want to allow for that, and whether that stuff all gets deleted or we let people vaguebook about the time their pride got injured two years ago because they posted something people disagreed with and got made fun of for it.

@lotherio I think that was more because saying I mischaracterized an argument is similar to saying someone was disingenuous, so if the latter is an insult then the former would be also. I think this underscores that it is difficult to talk about this stuff in a civil way that doesn't spiral.

It is very understandable that any accusation of not doing work or that their creations are derivative is insulting and unfair. I really think that sort of thing is unnecessary and very unfair to creators, and you and Faraday in particular do tremendous work, but it is also extremely difficult to talk about any of this in a way that someone doesn't take personally.

I really don't think that saying 'avoid personal attacks' is a good metric for trying to stop threads outside of the Hogpit from becoming super hostile. Like, Tempest's first post that started the genosha split was probably not intended as an attack but saying, 'Hey doing this will make your game fail' whether it's right or wrong is something that's pretty likely to start a fight. Basically anyone talking about anything that assigns fault or grades anyone's ability in this hobby in any way is going to be fighting words, whether it's said as fair minded criticism "I think your design choices there were flawed..." or not even remotely constructive, "your RP sucks and that's why you can't find RP."

In other words, it probably is healthier if the hog pit is just seen as the place to do criticism, because the odds of people arguing and it staying civil aren't great. Hell, most of the threads there don't stay that hostile to begin with, they change topics every page or so and keep going for way long after the original argument.

I think that having an original setting that draws upon conventions is rewarding, though I do think it takes a really large investment of time and you'll never really be 'done' in explaining the world. Questions just not answered by a show or book series and pointedly ignored can also now be asked, so a creator can wind up pressured to define things they never would really want to address.

On the other hand, avoiding pedants who want to argue minutiae given in source material is imo very well worth it.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

MUSHes are reliant on the players being excited to help BUILD the game, create stories, etc. That excitement is pretty hard to bottle up and extract, and is needlessly wasted by these posts about "we're gonna open an XYZ game in 6 months", IMO.

I mean, you're right that MUSHes are reliant on everyone collaborating and generating content, and it's very reliant on everyone's enthusiasm, but I really don't think talking about it is wasting energy or hype or whatever. I personally think that stuff is a little overstated. Yeah it might get people to have a look at a webpage, but let's be real, people telling their friends what a blast they are having with storylines is what gets people to invest that time way more consistently. If someone logs in and they get pulled into RP and have fun, they probably stick around, while if they get crickets in an OOC room except for a douchebag bragging about their character, they don't. A wave of hype helps create the former but it doesn't sustain itself that great since it's super fragile to rely on a bunch of people entertaining each other without a core that keeps it going.

I mean the big danger of the hype thing is someone logs in, makes a character, and then doesn't find RP or has a bad experience that sours them. Then they aren't going to come back again unless their friends tell them it's better or whatever.