Best posts made by Derp

@carma said in What is a MU*?:

"Hey now pard'ner, we don't have to spend any time letting blind people play our games."

Which is not at all what I said, but alright. I said that there is a difference between a professional coder being held to accessibility standards and an unpaid hobbyist being held to those same standards, as they likely have no education or experience in those matter, if they've ever been taught design in the first place.

I'm not saying that we should keep blind people out. I'm saying that the how dare you sir reaction to not having it built in from the get-go is a bit much given the difference in who is actually creating the game.

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

ETA: I may be confused and you're meaning apps for plain, simple tailors and you know there's nothin' more to them, because you read the apps. Rather than being a player and coming across a tailor PC.

That is what I mean, yes.

In your case, he isn't a tailor. he's like -- a sleeper agent with a cover as a tailor, and has already mapped out the critical path necessary to get him out of the dressing room and into the dungeon on his own initiative.

I mean the people who will just app in a tailor, nothing more, and then get mad that they aren't Central to Everything, or the ones that app in something so far out in the fringes that even though they took the initiative to create something ostensibly deeper than 'plain simple tailor', working them into the storyline would be kind of maddeningly difficult.

For the latter, think like -- the guy that apps the feudal era samurai that only speaks japanese and can't understand modern technology onto DS9 and then gets mad when they aren't on every away mission.

There is a certain amount of 'dude, seriously?' that comes along with certain concepts, the too-plain or the not-nearly-close-enough.

If someone else has already mapped out a reasonable path forward that doesn't require the entire game to shift to accommodate them, then yeah. They're in the clear.

@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

There's a plot hole, it doesn't make sense!

Then there's some other mystery to poke at cleary.

That magic spell doesn't work that way, stupid!

It sure did this time. Find out why.

This NPC doesn't have the authority the whole premise is built around, ugh!

Then you'd better ask him why he's trying to pull off this con. You'd better hope he doesn't have this handed down from someone on high that wants to remain anonymous. That would suck for you.

You ran combat but you're not doing initiative right, learn the rules first you noob!

We're running a streamlined narrative version of the rules that the GM is more comfortable with, and the GM is fully empowered to do so. If you don't like it, we can find a way to k/o your character for this plot.

TL;DR -- there are always criticisms. People are bitchy and pedantic in MUSH and have been for 30+ years. The whining is predictable. The replies are practically canned.

@Pondscum said:

When you know that you can throw a complete curve ball at another player's character and that they'll catch it and run with it. Damn do I love players like that and it makes for some of the most spontaneous, engaging and fun scenes.

I've been having a lot of this lately, truth be told, and it's started to give me some fuzzy feels. There are a handful of people that I've started playing with who just... run with things. And they throw things out that I can run with, too. There's just a flow, and it's been working out so very nicely that some of my faith is starting to be restored.

Related: When you can talk to people OOC about what you want, and what they want, and really work together to try and make amazing things happen IC even knowing that for that first little bit it'll be awkward as fuck as they try and get a feel for each other IC, even though you know what's happening OOC.

@Misadventure said in PC antagonism done right:

...they gather up and take on the bad people, whether anyone wants them to or not.

It can refer to being a bully for "good" IC, or the dogpile of good folks all looking for something to do because they are do-gooders.

Caveat: I've only had experience with WoD MU's, not Superheros or anything else, so my opinion here probably has some bias.

But this is a thing I see happen a lot. Like, way too much. Even a rumor of an antagonist faction PC/NPC gets around, and suddenly fifty people are on the Murderboat. It doesn't matter that normal people don't go around killing people. It doesn't matter that it's a Morality sin, and totally out of line with their character. An 'antagonist' shows up, and someone needs a-killin', and people write it off like it's not a big deal. DnD Fighters and Wizards go in, blow shit to hell, and then cheer each other over beers.

It's why, in my experience, nobody even bothers with those antagonists anymore. Fifteen people dogpile on it, and either a PC ends up dead, and you get -thirty- people dogpiling on it for revenge and honor and bullshit, or the NPC gets away and it's a gamewide manhunt. There's no way to make them recurring, threatening things because everyone wants an all-out, no holds barred war, and no matter how much you say 'this is not how it actually works', people are unwilling to listen.

I think that antagonism only works in a game if the staff are willing to say 'this is how the actual antagonism is going to go down, and if you step out of line with that, there will be serious consequences from both sides'.

@WTFE said in Identifying Major Issues:

SOMETHING HAPPENED to that player base that used to be self-starting and fun-seeking and turned them into the mewling "entitled" zombies you see today. If you don't figure out what that something was, you won't change anything. And the connected counts at MUDstats will continue to drop.

That's easy; those players matured.

It's not a trite answer. It's a real one. They got older. They got jobs. They got less time.

But importantly, their tastes also changed. Whereas before it was easy to just drop a few orbs on the outskirts of town, slay a few orcs/bugbears/cylons/sentinels/whatever and call it a day, their taste in stories matured with them. They wanted more drama, more involvement. More character building. Just more.

But that requires more setup. More investment. More time. And time is a luxury a lot of us don't have now.

So what changed in those ten or fifteen years with those players? Their age. Their connectedness to information. Their maturity.

So , I guess we need to fix that. It's easy. Recruit the younglings that have no time or lives but also have a level of skill and facility with writing that will please our aging population. Cake.

I'll just go ahead and answer these.

Point number 1: Questions are welcome via PM because Ganymede has said that questions are welcome via PM when it comes to administrative decisions. She might decide to open up the board for it. I don't know. What I do know is that our standing request is to have them done via PM, so I put them in there via PM.

Point Number 2: This isn't a bug. It's a feature. You might have noticed, but certain persons have gone to great lengths to skate right along the very border of what a written, explicit rule will let them get away with, and then choose to cite that rule back in the face of the mods when told to knock it off. So now we've given notice that this kind of behavior will be seen as violating the rule in question. For 99% of our users, this won't ever be an issue. For that other 1%, they're now on official notice.

@MisterBoring @NotSanni

I get that you two have bad blood with @Ghost or whatever. I can respect that. But derailing a thread about how to generate more positive interactions with some thinly veiled ad hominems isn't gonna fly.

Go do that on the other forum.

If you want to get into a more heated talk about the criteria for judging sincerity and whatnot, might I suggest the Debates and Reviews section of the forum?

@hella

I've been thinking about ways to do this, too. Maybe some kind of Token system where you can 'cash in' some chips or something to have an effect on the game that you don't have to worry about RPing out and scheduling and finding the time for.

Like, if your character is a Renowned Banana Expert and the plot requires something to do with Bananas, and you're finding it hard to get into, maybe you cash in one chip to be able to make a profound discovery about the Ultimanana and its effects on the Potassium Monster or something.

Not sure how it would work out though.

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

While I understand and concur with most of your responses, doesn't this sounds a little bit witch hunty?

Without some due diligence on the part of staffers, yes it can become something used against "good" players. But like @Arkandel said, it's better than the alternative, of letting problem players lurk in the community, waiting to harm other players and drive them away.

I think that I would personally disagree with this particular take. I don't think it's better to excise anyone accused on the grounds that they might have done something wrong, but I suppose that's where the due diligence part comes in.

The problem is that not everyone agrees on where that diligence should be. Here, we've seen this kind of behavior weaponized. At least two of the admin team has seen this happen in real time, and so we've chosen the path of 'if you make an accusation, bring receipts'. We feel that's more than fair in a hobby where everything is text based and able to be logged.

Some people have said this makes them feel unsafe. Well -- ok. I suppose that depends on your definition of 'safe'. If your definition of 'safe' is 'able to make accusations against people with no evidence and expect that action be taken based solely on my word alone' then no, this is not a space wherein that would be acceptable behavior. If your definition of 'safe' is 'here is what happened, here is the evidence that I have for it, here is the action I would like to see taken', then it's a perfectly safe space. That's the standard that we operate on here. Other boards and other administrations and other games have other standards.

It's impossible to find one way of doing things that is going to make everyone happy. And frankly, some of the same people that advocate for 'remove people from your game if they are a general pain in the ass' also decried Ganymede's decision to remove people being openly and actively hostile toward her on a space that she ran and paid for, so trying to divine a good standard from those kinds of conflicting viewpoints is a losing game anyway.

Is it bad when I find a new game and then actively want to not advertise it because I think it's made of pure awesome and don't want the rest of the fools to ruin it? I mean, they will eventually, most likely. It always becomes a thing. But god-damn- do I want my five minutes or so of bliss.

@WildBaboons said in Pro Wrestling MU?:

@chibichibi

Playing a character that is playing a character seems too many levels deep.

Having a blast doing it on The Network.

Right now, I'm working more on RL resolutions. I would like to get back into fitness stuff, but I think I need a trainer, so my game stuff is on hold until I get RL to cooperate.

But I would love to find a reliable block of time to unfreeze at least one of my characters.

Here's a board that we can use for what MU Gripes and Peeves used to be for. Those little things that start to build up and build up and you just kind of feel like you need to get them off your chest before they explode or eat you alive.

I can start:

I feel like i've been working hard lately to make a group work on a game. I've been coming up with plots and doing a lot of other stuff to make it feel cohesive and engaged and just in-general fun for the people working it.

And then something happened. Something, by all accounts, relatively minor. But that minor little thing stuck in my brain and just won't let go. It's a rabid little brainweasel and it refuses to die no matter how much 'you are being irrational' salt I pour on this thing.

And so now -- I'm still doing the thing before. Finding out how to grow the group, finding out how to make things awesome and get people playing and having fun --

But now I can't help but think 'but you need an escape plan in case this thing that should be No Big Deal turns out to be a Big Deal'.

And that is a terrible place to be in, headspace-wise. It sucks. It just sucks.

Yeah, I'm with @Coin here. That's a pretty shitty thing to do to your players. I'm not a huge vampire fan, but even if I were, that's absolutely enough to make me never want to log in there. Also:

4.3. Characters will be designated inactive after two weeks of inactivity.

is quite a bit different from:

4.3 Character will be designated inactive after two weeks of inactivity and then subjected to whatever sorts of whimsical death staff feels is appropriate for that character.

One says inactive. This is not 'inactive'. We're talking about PC death here. That's a way different ballgame.

@faraday

Opt-out also gives you more fine-grain access.

You want to opt-out of an entire category, set the category to ignore.

You want to opt-out of specific threads, then you just ignore those threads the same way.

If you want to opt-out of everything in a category except for specific threads, you can go in and set the category to ignore, and then set the specific threads to 'Watching' which will override the category behavior.

It really does give people a hell of a lot more control over their ultimate experience.

@misadventure said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

The small mountain of examples up there.
These do not all agree, just examples.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Conversely, the couple of games where I've been on that had social stats either 1) gave no real backing to those social stats, or 2) suffered from the same issues I have crop up in LARP - I am my character, thus my agency is infringed upon if you use your Lies Stat @ Eleventybillion.

At the end of the day, I don't think that anyone is going to come to a resolution on these things that actually makes everyone happy. My personal opinion is, if you're trying to use an OOC mechanic to justify why your character is not subject to an IC mechanic, e.g. most arguments about agency etc., then you're not playing by the rules of the game. i.e., cheating.

But other people's mileage obviously varies.

I think what needs to happen is that games just need to decide whether they're using social dice or not, and then actually put the effort into making those dice matter. If certain players don't like the idea that there are social dice on this game that could be used to influence their PCs mindsets and behaviors? Cool. Play on one of the games that don't.

I know that if I ever open a game, provided I can find some time in the future (internship is over this week, thank god), it will absolutely have enforced social stats. And I know that not everyone will want that to be a thing, or be comfortable with that. And that is fine. Games don't need to be everything to everyone. They just need to offer an appeal to a group of players that have a like mindset in these matters and make it happen consistently.

You'd think that they would either get bored or like -- learn to be less creepy. But no. Neither of those things. It's truly baffling.

@Ganymede said:

Terminating that character's ability to come back, by policy or otherwise, is one way to ensure that the active players can go on with their lives.

In a way, this is necessitated by the Off-Stage System implemented on the game. If you let people sit on territories indefinitely, there will be a problem as new blood comes in. Removing characters permanently ensure that territories remain in the hands of active, participating players.

There are other ways of handling this too that don't involve PC death. Killing a PC is the absolute laziest and most unfair method of going about something. If the goal is to fix people sitting on territory or whatever, then it's pretty easy to say that they abandoned it, for whatever reason. Hostile invasion that they escaped from, and then had other PCs come in and claim it from hostile invaders, etc. There are plot-generating, non-final was of resolving this situation that aren't in any way connected to the death of the PC.

So if that's the reason that staff are claiming, then I call that some lazy bullshit, right there.

Edit: To fix the quote.

The suggestions category is not the category for the conversation happening above right now.

Everyone involved in it, please stop.