Best posts made by faraday

@Tinuviel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Is this higher than 'typical' coronavirus (as in the category of virus) cases for that age group?

The "typical" coronavirus is just a common cold which doesn't kill anybody.

For the flu - CDC numbers show about a 0.8% mortality for age 65+ compared to .1% across all ages.

With COVID-19, estimates vary, but in the ballpark of 1-2% across all ages and 10-20% for the elderly.

So in both cases, the elderly are 8-10 times more likely to have more serious outcomes, but COVID itself is 10x as serious. So that's a hefty difference.

The real issue here is not the percentages, it's the quantity based on the speed and scope of the outbreak. We get ~500,000 hospitalizations in the US annually from the flu over the span of several months, and that is a moderate but predictable strain on our healthcare system. Add in another few hundred thousand cases on top of that in a few weeks and the system quickly starts to break down, as it has in Italy.

It will be a tremendous inconvenience for me to have my kids off school for the next 2-4 weeks, but I accept that this is necessary to protect the community and slow the spread of this thing.

With more folks trying out the new servers like Evennia and Ares, I've seen a bunch of questions about what they can do, what they're suited for, etc. So I made this document to help folks compare MU server features:

MU Server Roundup.

Please let me know if anything in unclear or incorrect. Thanks to @Griatch and @Ashen-Shugar for reviewing the doc and pointing out some errors, and @Thenomain for letting me bug him about his WoD code.

@surreality But... why listen to them? I mean, the idea that original theme games can't work is demonstrably false. Arx, Firan, Aether, Castle d'Image, Otherspace... some of the most famous and arguably "successful" games in MU* history have had original themes.

Incidentally, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with somebody not wanting to invest a ton of time to get into a game. This is not a problem unique to original themes either. I've seen tabletop players shy away from RPGs with heavy lore or complicated mechanics because it's too overwhelming. I personally wouldn't have bothered trying out the 100 MUSH if someone told me I had to watch all three seasons of the show to effectively play there. It's all about barrier to entry. How many hurdles are between me and the fun of actually playing the game.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I, personally, would love the ability for players to be able to add to the game, even if just rooms, or an object that alters the desc if they want.

Players can build in Ares (and I presume Evennia) if you give them permissions. I don't have a quota currently but it would be easy to add one. And there are ways to alter descs, though not with objects. Evennia even has a quasi-softcode system.

I don't think that the presence or absence of softcode is the defining quality of what makes a MU. More than a few folks have logged onto BSGU - particularly before the web portal took off - and didn't even realize it was a brand-new server and not PennMUSH.

@Ganymede said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

This is how my mind works, but I can honestly say I don't feel or believe I have ADHD.

You can certainly have a racing mind and NOT have ADHD.

Executive functioning covers a variety of brain activities (source

Even neurotypical people will have individual variances in each of these functions. You can be scatterbrained (working memory) or disorganized (activation) or impulsive (emotions) without having ADHD. Having ADHD is more about having a cluster of challenges to a clinically significant degree.

I've become anti-grid these days. Just give me a scene system and a wiki page with a map and some established locations. Couple of reasons why...

• Almost everyone uses meetme anyway. You spend all this time building a grid and worrying about the exits and everything, and most of the time it's just wasted effort. (*)
• The concept of a grid is arbitrarily limiting. I mean - there's a whole city out there right? It's good to have some pre-defined hot spots for a starting point, but why does everyone always have to hang out at the same one or two bars? This isn't Hollywood where we have to pay for sets. Encourage people to use their imaginations more.
• Building is a hassle. Especially when you have to deal with private apartments and businesses and whatnot.
• I think the concept of a grid and rooms is one of the biggest obstacles to explaining "how mushes work" to new players.

(*) even before meetme, we had speedwalking. And the reason meetme caught on so much IMHO is because traversing the grid is not fun - it's just a boring task that gets in the way of actual RP.

@Rook For me, any new game has to answer the simple question: What do the PCs do. I don't mean who they are (vampires, knights, etc.) - that's the setting. I mean what do they do on a day to day basis. That's the game. Many games don't answer that question, and in absence of an answer people fall back to bar and relationship RP.

BSG has a very laser-focused answer to that question: You fight Cylons. We offer frequent (1-2 per week) action scenes, mostly combat-oriented, interspersed by "slice of life in wartime" inter-personal RP. If you're looking for literally anything else you're not going to find it there. Want to play a civilian in a post-apoc setting? Nope. Political RP? Nope. Gaining power by climbing a ladder? Nope. PVP? Nope. Investigating Cylon tech? Nope. Racking up the XP to become super-awesome? Nope.

Obviously I don't have the capability to do an "exit poll" on everyone who wanders off and doesn't come back. But my impression from chatting with various folks is that they were just looking for something different. Nothing at all wrong with that, and I don't consider it to be a failing of the game on the whole.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

neither Ares nor Evennia are bringing anything to the table that we haven't had for the past 25 years (except for the ability to code MU*s in Python and Ruby

That thing that you describe as 'except for' is a big deal though. MUSHCode and C had their days, but their days are long gone.

Another thing that Ares is designed to bring to the table is a game that is fully functional out of the box, with all the systems people expect (from jobs to chargen), configurable without touching a lick of code. I haven't seen that in any other MU system, but if I'm wrong there by all means please highlight alternatives to raise awareness.

Also, do those other platforms have a built-in wiki and fully functional website with real-time notifications to and from the game? There are a lot of games out there struggling with keeping data consistent between the game and an independent wiki.

I don't think anybody's saying that the new platforms are some kind of jaw-dropping revolution. But I think it's doing them a disservice to claim that they're not offering anything that hasn't been around for 25 years.

@Wretched Wait... that's not a thing everyone does? :shiftyeyes:

@apos said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

For the mail, does the player of Stella have any idea whether that is IC or OOC, and whether they should respond ICly or OOCly? Probably not.

Great topic. I would just clarify one minor bit here that folks like me saying "mail and messenger are functionally equivalent" are assuming that you use the tool to provide proper context. So it would be more like:

Mail:
TO: Stella
FROM: Bob
Subject: --IC Message-- Hey we should meet
Stella gets an IC message on her wristcom:
From Commander Robert, to Ensign Stella, sent at 10:37 am yesterday, IC time.
"When are you next free? Please hit me up."

I bring this up not to quibble, but because I think it's important in any conversation about immersion that the alternatives be functionally equivalent. Otherwise yeah, you get confused players.

To use another example of immersive code - +knock.

Bob uses +knock.
Stella sees: Someone is knocking on the door.
Stella uses +peephole to see that it's Bob.
Stella uses +shout to say "Who's there?"
Bob sees her shout. Shouts back. Etc.

versus

Bob pages Stella, "Hey, Bob's outside your door knocking."
Stella now has context and doesn't need to use any commands to figure out what's going on. Stella pages Bob, "OK, she looks through the peephole and then opens the door."

or

Bob and Stella just get in the room together immediately because they know they're going to do a scene and OOC chatter some establishing details so then someone can pose:

There's a knock on the door. After a brief exchange establishing that it's Bob outside, Stella opens it. "Hey Bob. What's up?"

As I mentioned on the other thread, I don't feel immersion in MUSHes. Ever. So to me, the messenger or knock code is just a PITA because it adds absolutely nothing to the game for me, but it's a whole other set of commands I have to learn just to do things I can otherwise already do. And as a coder, that's a whole other set of commands I'd have to code just so people can do things they can otherwise already do.

But I do understand, at least in an abstract way, that there are people out there who get something out of this stuff. It's just hard to relate to since I'm not one of them.

My observation, based on a limited subset of games and players...

For a variety of reasons -- aging playerbase with more commitments, people getting burned out/fed up, MU*s not lasting as long as they used to, etc. etc. - people are more driven to "maximize" the efficiency of their playtime.

People don't just want to RP, they want to tell their story - whether that's their character's climb up the social ladder, search for a significant other, quest for battlefield heroics, or whatever. 'Bar RP' and random 'meet&greet RP' is seen as a means to an end or a time-wasting filler when nothing better is available.

The natural consequence of this shift is people hanging out in OOC-land waiting for the players/events that further their story. You get appointment RP instead of people randomly wandering the grid striking up scenes with strangers.

I personally don't see a problem with this. I see it as a natural evolution of the genre/playerbase, and one that I have no trouble embracing.

The benefit of opt-out is that it works for ANY category. Don't want to be bothered by codey stuff? Ignore the MU Code category and it won't show up in your recent list any more.

I agree that the flammability of Hog Pit and Politics probably warrant a pinned topic at the top of the categories to remind folks they CAN opt out, but at the end of the day it's not the admin's job to teach people how to use the basic forum features.

My ADHD pet peeve of the week/month/year is people who don't get back to you. Like I get that everyone's busy, but man. Now you're making triple the work for me because I have to put in elaborate systems to remember to check in with you to follow up on the simple request I sent. And that's not easy.

RP scene set: It's a terrible storm, people are scurrying indoors.
Ambiance emit: You hear a bird chirping outside.

RP scene set: It's just before closing time. The bar is empty save for the two PCs having a very tense conversation.
Ambiance emit: A drunk knocks over a table in the back.

RP scene set: Wow what a lovely dinner we just had.
Ambiance emit: You feel hungry.

In all cases my reaction is exactly the same: :eyeroll:

The emits lack context to what's actually going on, so they come across as disconnected and invasive. A better thing for RP hooks IMHO would be a sort of mini plot generator that could spit them out on-demand as ideas before a scene started.

But as long as you can turn them off and don't have to be bound by them, I guess I'm "whatever" about them.

For reference/feedback, here is the sort of command I had considered.

help suspect

The suspect command helps you guard against OOC harassment. If someone is bothering you, you can set them suspect. This will start a running log of any private pages between the two of you, and any poses/OOC chatter when you're alone in a room with them. It does not log any other commands. If something inappropriate is said, you can then report them and the log of recent chatter will be automatically sent to staff.

suspect <name>=<on or off>
suspect/report <name>

@aria said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

So when people say that things are "back to normal", I honestly don't know what the fuck they're talking about. What is the phrase for feeling like you're being gaslit by 300 million people?

Same.

@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:

The curious part in this though is that while the primary motivation for these types is socialization they are acting in a decisively antisocial manner.

I don't think the primary motivation is socialization for all MUSHers. At least not on a general level. Many people play solely to play with their friends. Others are on the extreme anti-social side and view other players as nothing but props to enable or witness their rise to greatness. Cliques, creepers, glory-hogs, theme-breakers, and just plain-old rudeness... when you think about it, there's a crap-ton of anti-social behavior rampant in MUSHing. (And on the internet in general, though that's a separate-but-related issue.)

@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:

I feel sometimes we take things for granted in our community, including the time and energy put forth by others for our entertainment. The world outside of MUSHdom isn't our oyster to harvest for our fun as we see fit, so why should a MU* be?

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.

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

Just blame me for that instead of @Ganymede, because I do think that. I also think we should dump telnet and play the whole dang game on the web. But that's neither here nor there.

Coding the same thing twice (once for web, once for game) is frustrating, error-prone, maintenance-heavy, and at some level IMHO just insane. This is 2017 and the web is ubiquitous. Expecting people to use it does not seem like an impossibly high barrier to entry for a game.

BUT I know it is. So I coded both ways for a lot of things in Ares, even though I hated every minute of it.

@greenflashlight said in RL Anger:

Is that a danger to the firefighters, or just a waste of a drone?

https://www.faa.gov/uas/media/FAA_drones_wildfires_toolkit.pdf

Flying a drone near a wildfire is dangerous and can cost lives. When people fly
drones near wildfires, fire response agencies often ground their aircraft to avoid
the potential for a midair collision. Delaying airborne response poses a threat to
firefighters on the ground, residents and property in nearby communities, and it
can allow wildfires to grow larger...The National Interagency Fire
Center (NIFC) says it best: If You Fly, We Can’t.

@bad-at-lurking said in What isn't CGen for?:

Going from sheltered suburbanite, unsophisticated farm boy or crude thug to something more is a fun journey and there are only so many ways you can say, 'And then not a lot happened' before even the most disinterested staffer notices.

I think that's a good example of what chargen shouldn't do - judge people by arbitrary length requirements on backgrounds. If your character has nothing unusual/exceptional about them, then there's really not a lot to say. As app staff, I'm more interested in "what he doesn't know is that his dad was the famous jedi Anikan Skywalker..." than I am four paragraphs about his boring life as a moisture farmer living with his aunt and uncle.