Posts made by Arkandel

@zombiegenesis ***=NSFW content***

Mamba Out.

@misadventure said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

Getting out of this job.

You work for Blizzard. That's the dream!

Play again.

@auspice said in RL things I love:

@arkandel said in RL things I love:

@wildbaboons They ARE. Pulled pork/chicken is a big part of my noms because of mine.

Gib recipes.

You don't understand. If I needed something complex enough to require a recipe then I wouldn't cook it.

I'm the most boring eater. I can have the same thing every day forever, as long as I like it the first time around, and my bar is set pretty low.

But that's the magic of pressure cookers! It takes nearly no effort to make stuff, even straight from the freezer, which prevents me from ordering out (which costs more, has more calories, and might or not be as clean as I'd like) or just munching on random crap.

So for instance let's say I get home tonight and I have nothing to eat, no plans made ahead of time to thaw anything, I'm just.. there. Okay, so I'd grab a couple of chicken breasts from the freezer, stick them in the pot, spray them with herbs, onions, pepper, garlic, salt - all of which come out of assorted boxes, so maybe that's a minute-long process - then slam the lid on for an hour. At the end I take two forks and pull out some chicken meatz.

Can you do some awesome stuff? Damn right you can. I chatted with @Sunny's S.O. a while ago who had some ideas above and beyond my paygrade. But do you have to? Nawp! Which is why it's so great.

@wildbaboons They ARE. Pulled pork/chicken is a big part of my noms because of mine.

I just wanted to go over some stuff real quick. Please don't draw any conclusions about the timing, as it's got nothing to do with anything particularly recent.

The "Flag this post for moderation" button isn't a downvote alternative. Clicking it should mean that our very (veeeerry) relaxed moderation rules are being explicitly violated, and you want to bring the fact to our attention.

It's not there to signal that you don't like someone, or that you disapprove something that someone said; that's what the reply button is for.

This is more important if it's in the Hog Pit that you think something is inappropriate based on people being mean, unless they are also being blatantly racist, sexist etc at the same time; folks, it gets rude in there. If you can't handle that, please stay out. That forum category is opt-in only for a reason.

Finally, sometimes posts do go pretty... well, wrong, and it's easy to see why as soon as we look at them. However other times it's not as easy, not at a glance, and we don't always have the time to wade through those last eight pages of pissy back-and-forth to decide what the actionable problem is! So please send all three Moderators (myself, @Auspice and @Ganymede) a message at that time telling us in a concise way.

Thanks!

-The Management.

@theonceler said in Do you buy your RPG books?:

If the rule of law means so little to me I might as well pirate, it there's something special about paper you steal that you just don't get from beeps and boops that you steal.

Well, there is something special about paper. If you steal a physical item then someone else can't buy it; it's no longer available.

Digital files, when downloaded, don't take away anything from someone's inventory.

I'm not justifying the act, but I wanted to address the rhetorical (?) question there.

This thread is going horribly wrong.

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The problem there would be having a CG template that could understand advanced command definitions and that's a different sort of problem. Maybe have it read columns from the table?

Wouldn't it be easier to have a CG template that creates a message sent to staff, who can then construct the sheet for the applicant?

Easier for whom? It depends on your goals. If you are aiming to reduce work for staff then it wouldn't be, for example.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In this thread's context though all I'm saying is that the key isn't so far to do away with some features we are familiar with or to do them differently, it should be to provide the technical capability to do so.

I disagree. A platform that tries to be everything to everybody is by its nature going to be either

Sure, but I don't see how that's what I argued.

My point here is that with telnet there are many things you can't do. You just can't - and that's aside from whether you should be doing them. If you want to use italics in a pose... well, you can't (Pueblo protocol aside, of course), which is independent of whether people should be splashing italics all over their poses or not.

By allowing such features through different protocols some games will be developed that use these new (as much as enriched text is 'new' ) capabilities badly and that will hardly constitute progress, but someone will have a good idea which others will pick up on, copy and maybe improve - same as we did with telnet over the years.

The mancold is upon me.

Pray for me.

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel If we're talking about travel specifically, My personal opinion is that no game needs a grid. It's an expected feature of a game, but the reality is that nobody actually RPs in 90% of the rooms most games have. The reality is that you could open a game with a clear theme and maybe 10 important, constantly used locations alongside a coded RP Room creation wing and it would work just as well.

The problem is that if you do this, people will stare at you like you're fucking nuts.

Well, yeah, maybe. Probably. I certainly don't like grids - I know other people who do, however.

In this thread's context though all I'm saying is that the key isn't so far to do away with some features we are familiar with or to do them differently, it should be to provide the technical capability to do so.

A transition to a web-based model provides options. Some games will still screw this up but some won't, and over time someone will stumble into cool features that allow these tools to evolve, same as MUSH and MUD codebases did over the years.

Mind you, there must be a separation between providing new ways to doing things - that is, allowing for the possibility things could be done in a different way - and figuring out whether that's for the best.

For instance let's take travel from A to B. In traditional MU* that's a very spammy affair, and some people don't learn grids to begin with so they bemoan it; different approaches have been taken to mitigate these issues, from not showing the full room descriptions while you're traveling (i.e. only showing those when you explicitly type "look") to being able to summon/jump to a friend with permission directly. And yes, those could still be improved with a web interface by completely eliminating spam altogether, choosing your destination visually from a minimap overlay or whatever else.

However.

That is necessarily the best way to do things. For instance World of Warcraft specifically moved away from providing instant travel (and still only allows specific static portals, mostly for use between expansions and not cities or landmarks in general) in order to facilitate immersion and the concept of a consistent world by giving players a sense of scale of entire sprawling continents, ruined kingdoms and lush landscapes they'd have otherwise never visited unless they had to.

It still doesn't mean moving to a new paradigm isn't important. As it stands we simply lack the technical capability, due to telnet's inherent limitations, to do many things differently. Other solutions are imposed by those limitations so they might be wild goose chases if we carried them over to a new platform.

@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Legit, no. No. You may think this is all fine, but it's not. It isn't like walking into a developer meeting and raising your hand and whatever. Someone asked a question, specifically, about what people had tried in other formats. They suggested an idea that they were tinkering with.

They didn't ask, 'please list all the reasons you think I am wrong for wanting to develop this thing'.

That's true. This is a conversation guys, please don't make it personal or paint anyone disagreeing as if they're having some kind of agenda here.

Please debate the issue, not the debaters.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Shift every rule, check and validation into a web client, and you will have a complex web client. Why? CharGen is complex. Shift every +command into a web client, and you will get a complex web client. A window for seeing who's in the room, who's online, including filtering for "Everyone in WHO", "My friends", "Just in this Room", or "My Faction". That alone speaks to things being complex to learn, potentially lending to people missing things.

Let's take a stab at this. I'll use three separate examples.

1. "Every +command turned into a web interface"

Case A: You type "+bbpost 4/Looking for TS" and then "+bb I will TS you if you let me." and then "+bbproof" followed by "+bbpost".
Case B: You use web form with a subject line, a text box and a submit/cancel button.

2. "Windows for seeing different kinds of information"

Case A: You type "who", "who/guild*" or "look" to see different things. The screen scrolls in each instance.
Case B: You click on a sliding panel where you can filter these things visually. Once done you hide it so it's not in the way until you need it again.

3. "CGen"

Case A: You type "raise/lower dexterity", "+merit Contacts=2" and then a syntax I really don't remember at the moment about setting +notes on yourself with the attributes of the merit.
Case B: You have a nWoD sheet. You click on the dots you want. For merits there's a drop-down with the available ones, and when you select "Professional Training" a second pulldown appears for you to select from.

It's really not the same.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@Arkandel
I just don't see the difference between typing things out and filling out a webform, when it comes to making a MUSH character, other than the UI. You still have to write up a description, you have to select all the nibbly bits of Stats, Attributes, Powers, Weapons, Merits, blah blah blah...

But the UI is a tremendously important part of the exercise. Imagine if, in order to use Google Maps, instead of typing in an address (and being presented with potential matches you can just click on) shown on a map, you had to type in a long command, then manually grep through the text-only addresses to find the one you want, then having to paste the one into a second command to actually start being navigated there... in text, rather than being shown the roads.

Same thing, completely different experience.

It's not a dramatic example though. Even today to walk from Room1 to Room5 you need to get exposed to five rooms' worth of descriptions, character (or NPC) names, etc. It can easily scroll your screen a couple of times.

Now do that in a web client, picking from a map overlay, clicking on your destination... and you are done. Your main window is unaffected - in fact you can show or hide any unnecessary information at will.

Different experiences.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@Roz
Oh, don't get me wrong. I certainly don't think that you're making things up. I just think that MUSH is a niche, always has been. I have talked to lots of gamers that have never touched a MUD, and those are far more prolific than MUSHes.

It is and it isn't. There are hurdles we'll never realistically make appealable to the general public per se; for example many people just don't want to read long texts. Others are poor typists and don't like to type let alone write stuff for a long time. That's fine - no game is for everyone, right?

But we can definitely lower the freakin' bar to entry here - a lot. It's completely unnecessary to expose a newbie who doesn't even know if they are actually interested in 'roleplaying' (which to them might mean anything at all, from weirdo LARPer in parks to people dancing on Lakeshire mailboxes in WoW) to the mental gymnastics involved in creating a character using a command line, especially since it's quite likely nothing in their entire lives has forced them to use a command line before. They see a black screen, a prompt to type "+help" for help which... what does that do? And then they're on their own.

I don't think it's about intelligence. Yes, you do need to be somewhat smart to MUSH but I see no reason why perfectly clever folks might have just looked at the stuff above and gone "nah, why bother" and kept going.

We need to give them a carrot before we crack out the whip, people!

@golgoth said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For pages: Click user, send message. That's been done even for telnet based clients, but I think that requires Pueblo Enabled.

So instead of a generic ancient protocol we'd go back to a proprietary one which may or not work for mobile devices and might or not require using a specific client.

For CGen plus-commands: I haven't found a real quick solution for it, but I can. Players just won't like it since the idea that springs to mind is to force the player to ONLY do CGEN.

It's not just CGen - that's just one easy example. There are so many regular game situations (i.e. after you already have a PC) when commands on MUSH just need to be long - look at the syntax to write a bbpost; that's absurd to a newcomer. Every time I have to create a +note (which in many MU* is necessary if you want to purchase certain abilities or merits) I find myself cursing, and I've been using this crap for years.

These are all solved problems with a basic web interface.

@golgoth said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Instead of replacing a MU-client, the players generally have a choice to connect using the medium that they want.

I just wanted to isolate this part if you don't mind so I could point out this is not at all what's wanted here.

Ditching the dedicated telnet client (Potato, SimpleMU, etc) for what comes down to a web-based telnet client isn't an upgrade - in fact it's probably the opposite, since instead of gaining something you are actually losing features such as triggers, custom word highlighting, spawns, etc. I mean there may be browser extensions which can be substituted to provide some of these but it would still not constitute the paradigm shift wanted here.

None of the complexity - the arcane CGen plus-commands, the long stream of arguments needed just to send a page or construct a bboard post - is gone, all you are spared (and that's a maybe) is to download and install a separate program

A good marker for a true web based client would be that it's impossible to carry its features over telnet. A point and click interface for instance from CGen to combat or a non-scrolling terrain grid, or a forum with threads you can expand/contract, stuff like that. Aside from the input complexity, everything you do using telnet produces so much scrolling.