Best posts made by Arkandel

@Sunny This happened about... 11 years ago? At the time as a young PHP developer trying to save some money I was also teaching computer classes to novices as an extra income after work (the company I was working for also had a school in the same building so they tossed me extra hours as a 'benefit').

Anyway, this class was full of professional people. Electrical engineers, doctors... we're not talking kids barely out of highschool or uneducated folks here, right? So this was the very first session in which we were supposed to start with the very basics just in case, and I was just naive enough back then to think that hilariously unnecessary; stuff like 'this is the monitor, this is where you turn it off, but this is the computer and they're separate things', etc.

After demonstrating a couple of things I then took the mouse and waved it in the air as I explained how when you move it around, the lil' arrow of the cursor on the screen does as well. "Okay guys, now you try it and see."

And doesn't this goddamn doctor in his thirties pick his mouse up and wave it in the air as well.

I still facepalm about that one years later. The hell dude, you've never watched a movie or been to a store where someone used one of them things?

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

When it comes to individual character advancement, I am very biased in favor of 'earned', to the extent that the 'just handed out' portion I've considered implementing remains consistent and has a 'catch up' metric to not benefit early adopters to the detriment of new arrivals

I have two caveats about what you're saying sur. Let me break those down:

This is because different players have different strengths, and ultimately I believe in rewarding the player's contribution to the game (as a community) as much as anything any given character has learned or accomplished.

This is really important because you've seen how we all value different playstyles here on MSB even when it's a theoretical thought exercise and not a matter of dictating policy; anything from posed tense or length, playing to win or not, sharing or hogging the spotlight, PrPs versus grid play... it would be very easy for staff (and thus systems) to bypass players whose contributions are using a different vector than expected.

To give an example consider the stereotypical "quest-giver" type of high end noble. It's a pretty useful archetype - you're in a position to delegate responsibilities and thus generate RP for others, but depending on how that's measurable (or if) it can slip under the radar since you're facilitating rather than directly determining the outcome of RP. The party you just inspired to go investigate the attack at that farm got a sweet PrP out of it and some extra XP, but maybe your efforts weren't recognized the same way.

Earning things depends on observable contributions.

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be. It may be volunteering to help newbies at certain times, it may be running plots, it may be creating on-grid businesses, it may be creating new items in character, writing up specs for items/magic/rosters/what-have-you for the game on the whole to benefit from out of character, going for the compromise rather than the kill, taking a loss... the list is practically endless.

Again I agree, but again I'll present a counterpoint - in this case that what staff wants to incentivize isn't necessarily what they are actually doing.

For instance +vote based systems are supposed to reward socialization by crowd-sourcing the act... yet they have been known to go awry either because players mishandled them ('YOU get a vote, and YOU get a vote... everyone gets a vote!') or the carrot itself distorts the nature of interactions on the grid by creating gigantic scenes people join to try and milk votes. Both HM and Arx have suffered from the same issue, at least for those who prefer smaller gatherings, since they can force players to choose between comfort and advancement.

In other words even if you go in with the purest motives to reward what you want to encourage, it doesn't mean you don't end up inadvertently causing a different, possibly unrelated or even counterproductive effect.

@paris said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

@arkandel I'd be happier about this if you leave update posts by the thread originator-- I'm not speaking for bot, but horrormux goes through a theme change every couple months, and archetypes open up between stories. Being able to update that and leave posts there would be convenient.

That's what we're doing.

The only people allowed to post on Ad threads are the originators (or staff working for that game, but if I find out they're not authorized to do so things won't be pretty for them). They can edit the posts, respond to them, anything they like.

Everyone else who wants to comment about those games needs to do so in the game's corresponding threads elsewhere (Mildly Constructive, Hog Pit, wherever).

Yeah, media is jumping on 'deaths by PGO' lately. They are a handful of deaths across the world for a game played by millions, and it'd be no different if the same victims were distracted by anything else at all at the time.

The correct news should be "distracted driver/pedestrian is killed". The exact thing they were doing at the time is largely irrelevant, they knew they weren't supposed to be doing that (hell, the game in question actually spams you to remind you if somehow you've failed at adulting).

@faraday said in Earning stuff:

And forget about ever trying to catch up to my friends, who have been playing longer. Even with the bonus rested XP or whatever, it's the Dino Effect on a massive scale. I hate it.

I honestly feel the rat race (har har) in regards to leveling is an artifact MMOs are simply copying over from one to the next any more or a money grab to prolong subscriptions. There's no point in it. In the majority of games there the progression from 1 to $MAX_LEVEL doesn't count anyway since gameplay (be that raiding, PvP or whatever else) is aimed for the max. For example any new storylines WoW introduces is only available for 110 (the current maximum) so leveling an alt there is, at best, a timesink.

However to truly catch up on the power curve all that matters is gear. To avoid the dino effect you mention WoW has periodic catching up events - basically when they have a big patch every few months to introduce fresh, harder content they also open a new quest nexus or vendors who hand out cheap gear just high enough to handle that content enough to farm better stuff.

That doesn't mean either is bad though, as millions of players who do play those games illustrate. It just means people look for different things in their games.

Yeah, if one kind of game was what everyone enjoyed then by now we'd have figured out what it is, and that's all we'd be making.

@magee101 said in What's your favorite MU* client?:

How dare you nost list MUSHclient. The game is literally in the title XD

I have shamed my clan this day. <hangs head>

Not a link per se but I read it today and it made me laugh.

"I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago. Because when I die, I want to still remain active politically."

@wildbaboons said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

Welcome to Cloria, home of the Sacred Clora Seed, you're a Clorian.

Someone from the middle of the country would they be referred to as a... Midi-Clorian?

Get out.

@paris said in What's your favorite MU* client?:

I prefer simpleMU* after struggling with potato, and IIRC finally did figure out how spawns worked in potato, but I still prefer simpleMU*. It took me a long time to switch out of tinyfugue, too, though. I get really rigid about my client preferences.

I am the same way but here's a thing; it might be that we're simply used to one interface - after all it's the one we've been using for what, 10-15 years now? - so it's hard to give any other a fair chance if it's different at all.

My Druid, Taurobolium, whose surgically picked transmogs will have gone to shit by tonight when he'll be in mismatched green drops from random boars and rewards for killing ten wolves.

@apos @apos said in Earning stuff:

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.

Do you think it's a oversimplification to break it down to this:

"Players want things which are rare and special. However if many possess them they are neither rare nor special."

Because of it's not then it's at the heart of our impasse. We are deadlocked between giving no one anything cool, making things uncool by handing them out generously, and facing allegations of favoritism if they are are handed out selectively.

Different games take different takes. My understanding for example is @faraday has picked the middle road, you've chosen the latter approach, and many WoD games took the first one.

@faraday said in What's your favorite MU* client?:

I think a lot depends on what features you use and how picky (I don't mean that in a bad way) you are about how those features work. I used SimpleMU for over a decade but then I got a Mac and switched to Atlantis. I've also used Potato. I don't really care. They all have the same basic features for the most part.

Obviously this whole 'preference' business is inherently subjective so take the following with a few grains of salt, since it only reflects my experiences.

I'm not at all picky about the UI itself in terms of say, shortcuts, tab placement or anything like that. I had to adjust going from zMud to SimpleMU and use ctrl+P instead of the up-arrow to find previous commands, for instance, and that was no big deal.

My asks are that I don't miss any information I want, everything I don't want is out of sight, and certain features I do use are present. So for example when I used Ares' web portal recently everything was different - of course - but the above criteria were still met; I had dynamic spellchecking from Chrome, channel or job spam wasn't in my face, so it all worked. However when I used Potato (I think?) I didn't have spellchecking and that was a downgrade in terms of features that having more colors didn't make up for.

The same thing happened with Kildclient. It was otherwise damn solid but the plugin it used for windows spawns wasn't reliable and I missed things sometimes because it didn't indicate (as of a year ago) 'new content' in any way for those tabs, or give me a way to separate inputs between stuff I sent to the spawned tabs and my main one.

An oldbie but I ran into it again today and chuckled. Again.

@coin said in Earning stuff:

Also, and I guess this wasn't clear in my initial post, these aren't things I believe are conscious; they're unconscious expectations, and when they aren't fulfilled, the frustrations manifest and the causes are misattributed.

They are also not necessarily unfair expectations. It's how we are brought up - there are simply very few paradigms outside of MUSHing in our pop or gaming culture that prepare a player for not being one of the main protagonists of their own setting. Books, most movies and TV shows, video games, fairy tales, short stories... there's a plot and it revolves around a relatively small cast.

Most non-RPG board games? Same thing - you play to win, and very little separation between you-the-player's success and your in-game one.

Hell, the very table-top games most MU* are based on are teaching the same lessons. The coterie or pack are the true movers and shakers of the world, and they're fundamentally involved in every major plot around them by definition - those arcs are major because they involve that plot. So when I decide to take Bloodsucker Jack from my table-top campaign and put him on your game as a complete newbie, how would I know I'm actually not supposed to act the same way and expect the same involvement as before?

From a certain point of view our expectations are unreasonable. It's not natural for players to change the way they think literally everywhere else other than in MU*.

@surreality I'm not worried people are talking shit about me all the time simply because most people don't think about me... almost ever.

That's about it. It's true for just about everyone.

I check Yelp out if I'm somewhere unfamiliar, like driving through a town I intend to stop for a meal. Sure, that 4.2 average rating restaurant might just be boosting its own scores but it's still a better indication than picking one at random, or just from how it looks like from the outside.

I'll always read semi-recent negative comments if there are any though. Even if they are overrated those are still there.

@tehom said in Managing Player Expectations:

What I'm curious about is the approaches that people might take to try to address the problem, if they think it's one that can have a solution at all. Should it be done culturally, with help files, onboarding of new players or the first time they participate in some staff-run plot, or something else that informs them to manage their expectations? Should it be something coded, where the scope of impact they could hope to achieve from some given action would be clearly delineated? Should it only be addressed on a behavioral level by talking to players who are clearly outliers? Or something else entirely?

In my opinion these are some important steps to take - from a staff's point of view in order to address this issue.

• Be honest with yourself upfront; how much time and effort are you prepared to put in it? You can't manage other people's expectations unless you're aware what they can expect from you.

• Know what your game is about. Is PvP a major element in it or are the sword skills for fights with NPCs? Is it a political game and are upper IC positions up for grabs by players? Even whether you are trying to make a large, popular MUSH or a smaller niche one matters.

• Be clear. There's no such thing as fair but you should be very upfront about the way things (ranks, titles, XPs, rewards, etc) are going to be distributed. Even if you say "I will give stuff as I damn well see fit" at least being honest about it mitigates latter complaints and lets people decide if your game is what they want.

• As long as you're spoiling things for your players, stomp on false expectations. If some things definitely won't happen in the scope of your game inform players early OOC. "No, you guys won't find a cure for the zombies and restore the world to a pre-apocalyptic state" is a fair thing to say, then they can then still work on that IC, but you did your part. "You won't discover gunpowder and invent muskets in my fantasy game". Done.

• Write and be consistent with your policies about both staff- and player-ran plots. What's the scope? Is there a risk/rewards ratio or are you rewarding participation and running the same across the board?

• If you reward plots - that's what carrots are for - but break down the numbers - this is important. Assume some edge cases; say a dedicated ST will run 2-3 PrPs a week, does that break your game's balance for their group? Are you okay with that given the activity it generates? Don't be surprised by the effects of your own policies.

• Groom your STs. Along with coders they are rare and very important, so keep communication lines open; if they facing any challenges you can help (say, they're not very good with the mechanics, or they can't handle large groups of participants, or they're getting harassed by certain players, etc) take care of them to the extent of your own abilities.

Just a few simple things, but they can make a difference.

@Darinelle I love them in Legion so far. 5-mans boss fights are often in some pretty tight quarters with a lot of stuff to avoid on the ground, so being able to heal on the movie is invaluable. Paladins and Monks (to a smaller degree) may be having a harder time at it for mythics.

@faraday said in Managing Player Expectations:

I agree with this 100% but I will point out that a lot of people take that same attitude even outside of MUSHing. I mean we've all seen people rip creators to shreds because a video game, TV show or movie wasn't to their liking. Not even because it was objectively bad, but because it wasn't what they thought it "should" have been.

There's a very big difference between the two however which we need to keep in mind.

When people bitch at a TV show or video game which otherwise has good ratings, the writers, cast or developers might be perturbed (everyone enjoys some appreciation, after all) but they are otherwise compensated for their labors. There is some real incentive for them, and future others, to go into the genre and work even if they need to turn social networks off since it pays the bills.

On the other hand there's a lot of work involved in setting up a MU* (which I'm sure is all news to you ). But appreciation and the satisfaction of work done well is the compensation those involved get - that's it, there's no cheque in the mail. In fact you have to pay to keep the lights on in the first place. To spend all those hours doing thankless things with your free time, or worse to be complained at, is a grind of its own.

So when we discuss expectations, those of administrators shouldn't be discounted. They are people, too!