Posts made by Arkandel

@kay I use it too. Of course it's such an ancient piece of software it's starting to develop its little quirks; for example copy+pasting out of it on Windows 10 works... inconsistently.

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

If you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSH clients then you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSHers. That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me, since it's not like we have a large population to begin with.

We've done this before, but maybe this is something we'd need to agree to disagree too.

See, the way I see it if we give MUSHers something that's better than what they have they will want to use it. But it needs to be good.

If we replaced SimpleMU (or whatever) with all its features with a functional web client which only has the bare essentials, or with a UI that's completely different from the classic "command line at the bottom, main window has the text", then yeah, they'll object.

But why would we do that?

@skew said in How to type `quit` and quit PennMUSH?:

What? Really? On some clients, disconnecting from a connected world will give a warning message. Other times, simply disconnecting doesn't seem to send the appropriate "disconnect" information to the server, and so you'll still appear logged in. T

Yep, and some of us like to connect from multiple clients (say, from home and work) in order to have access to the backlog from both.

If I just close the window from either the other connection will stick around. Now, sometimes that's what I actually want, but if I type 'quit' then I know I'm logged off from all my clients.

@dreampipe said in Dreampipe's Playlist:

I heard cool people hang out here.

Did you hear that from someone who hangs out here?

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.

I was actually talking about next-gen desktop/mobile clients. Like Atlantis3 or MUSHClient2. I really don't see the majority of MUSHers switching over to web clients any time soon. Even if we made a game-specific web client that was awesome, it would only be for that game, and folks really don't want to have a bunch of different browser tabs open for different games. Logging, spawns, dockable windows, events, highlighting ... these are all features that our MUSH clients offer that are not very conducive to developing on the web. And trying to make a web client that's both richly-featured and easily customizable for folks who aren't pro programmers? Good luck.

I'm not sure how you mean that. Maybe our disconnect here is that the kind of game I have in mind isn't one you can connect to over telnet at all (rather than one which allows a web client to connect to it as well, or enhance it in other ways).

So all of the features you mention would be done over the web client. Logging, spawns, dockable components, they've all been mainstays in web applications for many years now. The key is to not care about losing backward compatibility with MUSH clients.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44022550

What the actual fuck.

TL;DR: Girl gets gang raped. The Elders condemn the rapists to do 100 situps and pay $750 as their sentence. They are so enraged by the penalty they beat up her parents and burn her alive.

What the fuck, come on.

@magee101 said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@faraday tbh, I have no idea what telnet is really, except I think it's what I use on MUSHclient to connect to games? I'd really loathe to have to learn a new client after a decade or more of using MUSHclient >.< I am a creature of comfort.

The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.

The UI will be different for many web games though, that's true. However many current telnet-based games have different commands for CGen, getting places (+meetme versus @map versus +join), doing combat, etc.

They're the same - or very similar - only within the same 'family' of codebases, so for example if you're familiar with Theno's nWoD code you can play on almost every nWoD game using it with little need to adjust. However I'm pretty sure that'll be the same when our next-gen codebases mature enough to let us use the web; games using Ares will feel very similar even if they might look different (in terms of colors, etc).

@ixokai said in Humble Bundle: Digital Ocean Credit:

git GUI

Heresy.

Witches have been burned for less.

@three-eyed-crow said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@roz
I sometimes wonder if web clients that spawned/separated OOC channels to a separate tab by default would help with this. But it also might just confuse newbs even more, idk. Spawns weren't something I knew I wanted as a user until I was reasonably well-along in this hobby.

That's one of the many, many interface improvements that even become possible with web-based clients.

Newbies wouldn't be confused if the UI is right - it wouldn't be the first chat client they've seen. Something that looks and feels like Hangouts or Whatsapp but with persistent rooms isn't a huge paradigm shift from what they're used to.

Obviously it'd depend on the implementation, but that could be refined the traditional way - looking at the mistakes someone else made and refining the interface from one game to the next, trying things out until something sticks.

It's perfectly acceptable (and from a certain point of view, a positive thing) to realize RP just isn't working out between you and someone else because you're looking for different things.

This could be anything; emphasis on TS/romance, playing together more often, posing style, type of scenes, pace... anything. It's fine to just go find something else to do, it really is.

The issue here is how to communicate this. It's no surprise most of us aren't very good at communicating what we want to do. Notice the difference here:

• Hey, I was looking for more of <X> in my RP. Is that something you're also after and to what degree?

• Hey, you're not giving me enough of <X> kind of RP and I want more.

It's easy to mistake one for the other, but I don't like the idea of just cutting someone off without giving them a chance to even know there's a problem first. For all we know the other person would be into doing more of that sweet, sweet <X> or they haven't realized it wasn't happening because they've been busy doing <Y> instead.

But as usual how to bring it up requires trust, and that's not a common commodity. Hell, even the timing might matter; catch the other person at a bad time with something that sounds like a demand instead of a prompt to chat, and you can bring a good playing relationship to an end.

@vulgarkitten said in What is your turning point?:

What makes you say either 'hey I want to RP with this person way more' or 'hey I don't want to actively RP with this person anymore'?

If I'm having no fun playing with someone.

Which is completely different than not having fun with someone.

@kay said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

Re: recruiting new people, I think it's easier if they've already had their "gateway drug" to the realms of text-based multiplayer RP. I went from playing Infocom games to playing in the old AOL Red Dragon Inn chat rooms to someone then recruiting me to try a MUD. I ran from that, but was curious if there was more, maybe better? So then I searched and found non-MUD MU*s and, well, 13 years later, here we are. These days I'd guess maybe the gateway drug would be play by post? IRC? ... I'm so out of the loop.

Possibly by I doubt it, since there are no gateway games any more for MU*.

Back in the day chat and text-based games were really all we had so there was always some degree of familiarity with telnet'ing to some weird port somewhere, or using a command line IRC client or... something. Our expectations were also pretty low since even if we had some experience with rudimentary web pages whistling over our modems to Mosaic it was infrequent, and never that far from some black window somewhere that we had to open and use for almost everything else.

I'm not a 17 year old kid about to hit college but those used to be MU*'s bread and butter; young folks going to college where they had internet access for the first time and a lot of time to use it which they really couldn't do in that many different, fun ways; we grabbed ton of those - many of us are among those who were grabbed back then.

But now gaming is different. We are not gonna be taking players from Fortnight, you know? Hell, I don't even think we can lure them from Snapchat. I don't know there is any gateway services remotely relevant to young folks and MU* - the way MU* look and feel right now - at the same time.

After watching Infinity War and without any spoilers...

These guys have done an exceptional job building up the moving parts up to that movie, so much that they could just focus on telling a concise story. And what's amazing about it is how patiently they allowed character growth in ways other similar franchises didn't allow themselves to develop.

For example the common complaint about Superman is that he's boring. He's got too much power, he's a nice guy, there isn't much you can do with him.

And yet look at Thor; his power levels are off the charts, yet tracking his journey from the arrogant happy-go-lucky princeling who just wants to go have fun adventures with his trusted friends and annoying brother to the guy he was in Ragnaroc, coping with personal loss and the responsibility he's having to shoulder leading up to the fall of Asgard... that's interesting. You could take that characterization down many different paths, and the fact he can hurl lightning and punch people super-hard isn't in the way of those possibilities at all.

Or Captain America - he's the ultimate do-gooder, right? He's a walking flag, which should have limited him even further. Yet by anchoring him as a morality beacon and letting others respond to him Marvel created a really fun character. He's a badass (the elevator scene in Winter Soldier was incredible) and he has great chemistry with Iron-Man which improves on both of them immensely; either wouldn't be as cool outside of their conflict.

That's what makes something like Infinity War work. All the ground work has already been done so they can focus on telling really cool stories since the setup is already in place. And a lot of it - IMHO - comes from the fact there's one guy in charge of the whole vision, coordinating the overall arc to make sure every movie isn't just doing its own thing; Kevin Feige deserves a heap of praise.

@lotherio said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

If I log on at PennMUSH, Puggy, Brazil, RhostDev Site or any of the other social ones

That's the other thing... marketing! I mean RhostDev and PennMUSH aren't great names if you're trying to attract a demographic who don't know what the game type even is.

Somethingsomething ban.

@sunny said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I feel like it's unfair to ask how we can make the hobby more appealing to new people / how we can bring new people in, and note that we're not talking about X, Y, or Z -- when X, Y, and Z are the biggest issues surrounding bringing new folks in. I don't see how a constructive discussion that could actually accomplish anything is possible without breaking into things that are specifically noted as outside of the scope of conversation.

Oh you are right about how a conversation would need to tackle those other, more important issues as well. All I'm saying is that it's outside the scope of this thread.

We did have threads in the past, and we can have have one again at any time someone feels like making it, to discuss how interfaces would need to be designed, which clients or protocols would best achieve the goal of attracting newbies, how we can write helpfiles better (rather than just write better helpfiles, which refines, and thus maintains, the existing paradigm).

I would just rather we didn't try to do it all in a single thread since it's going to be all over the place as it is.

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest hurdles - in fact it's one of the reasons I got out of raiding on WoW, since I could/would no longer handle 4-hour blocks of focusing on gaming. MUSHing does have the turn-based element working in its favor (you have a good 5-10 minutes between poses to take care of your dog or do things around the house) but it's still a hefty requirement.

Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.

Aside from behavioral culture issues which I'm hoping can be tackled through staffing to the degree any other kind of game can, we also carrying a lot of jargon new players need to swim through.

Did I say new players? I meant all. I've been MU*ing for twenty years and I still don't know wtf MUX, MOO, etc all mean.

Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?

I think they wouldn't do it, not so much because they'd be mistreated but because they'd be sooo lost. That's an interface thing and I promised/asked to not go into it, but yeah... that'd be the first major hurdle.

Then finding RP would be the second one. The process of finding it isn't easy and many games are simply not frequented enough around the clock - and the etiquette of entering RP isn't obvious, either. I'd not be surprised if a newbie friend of mine entered a scene by talking about his background story for example ("Hello friends! I am a traveller beset by orcs who killed my family and...") and you can imagine how well that would go over. I don't know that there's a way to learn these things without making every mistake in the book and getting corrected, though.

But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem. Few people will be mean to you until your presence costs them something - until they're competing with you for a rank or some shit - at which point you're probably self sufficient enough.

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself?

I don't think you can make meaningful progress on that front without addressing the systemic, technical and cultural issues that would be (rightly) out of scope for this thread. People finding games is seriously the least of our problems.

Be that as it may, it could be a problem we can at least try to tackle. Obviously as long as what we are presenting newcomers is a black telnet screen we can't expect to go mainstream, but let's assume there are some suckers out there working on solving this problem.

So let's say we do have a clean, friendlier interface between our nameless newbie and our game. Even then how do we sell MU*ing? How do we even explain what it is to someone who might have some casual idea of what table-top is? It's not a 'virtual table-top game' in almost any conceivable way - the absence of a persistent GM guarantees the experience will be completely different. There's no one hand-feeding you roleplay when there's a lull. You might very easily (and in fact that's the default) find yourself getting out of CGen without any idea of 'what to do next'.

How do you bring a person into that fold?