Best posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

MSB isn't a democracy. If I thought not having a Hog Pit was the best option for us as a community then that's what we'd have now; no, what happened is that I was convinced to go that way based on the arguments made at the time.

Just to clarify my comment about voting ... I wasn't meaning to imply that you blindly cater to the whim of the majority. My point was that the majority want this. If the majority of posters were willing to limit their criticisms to mature, fact-based commentary ("Hey, I advise y'all not play on this game because the staff constantly shows favoritism to its inner circle and here are examples...") and the majority of posters were willing to limit their responses to mature rebuttals ("I think you're wrong about that because here are my reasons...") then we wouldn't need a Hog Pit. But sadly, that's not what the majority wants. So threads even in the constructive section devolve into childish spats of "you're a jerk!" "no you're a jerk!".

Nobody (that I've seen) is asking for a happy rainbow sunshine place where nobody disagrees or criticizes. Very few people are even calling for the destruction of the Hog Pit. All some of us are asking for is more moderation in the constructive area so that people aren't afraid to even post for fear of being dogpiled. Because that's a thing that happens here. As @surreality and @Derp pointed out, people are made to feel like crap for sport. People are driven into silence, unwilling to post. People are reluctant to even come to the forum because of its reputation. ("Wow, you're on MSB? Girl, why?!?!" is something I hear regularly.)

You feel those things are necessary evils in order to have a forum that supports free speech with no apparent hint of bias. I respect your right to make that decision because you are the moderators of the forum. Most of the time I manage to bite my tongue and not complain about it. But if, on a thread like this, opinions are solicited about the moderation policy, I'm going to speak my opinion that the current policy is a Bad Idea for the MU community.

@kk said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I prefer for every character to have a chance to be central as well. I just mean that such is not generally the case, not that it shouldn't be. I don't know how to make it the case and am content often with not being central personally.

It requires you to design the game to support that. Admittedly, not every game does, but it can and has been done. Perhaps a topic for another thread.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

But overall an issue we may want to debate separately here is that not all players are 'equal' when it comes to their ability to impact the plot. It's not necessarily a limitation imposed by their character's nature or stats either; there is a multitude of factors that allow some to take central stage more than others.

Yeah, I guess I see a fundamental difference between:

• I can't take center stage because my PC isn't in the Cool Faction/Job/etc.
• I can't take center stage because of my own lack of RP time / personality / etc.

The former is staff-directed; the latter is more a player problem. That's not to say staff can't help, it's just not staff's responsibility to deal with unsolicited IMHO.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

What I'd ask though is whether we can - or should - systematize so that even when I don't get to play the Sheriff the impact from 'losing' is mitigated.

I think that's solving the wrong problem. Why is "not being the sheriff" seen as losing in the first place? It shouldn't be that way. Instead of having a contest for who can be the one and only sheriff, make the sheriff a NPC and let the PCs be multiple deputies.

Competing for top dog "I am super special" positions is just never going to end well, no matter what kind of structures/incentives you put into place.

@roz said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

It would be much more productive to talk about "what are the most effective ways/tools we can use to help people navigate when there are thematic issues that hit too close to home for them OOCly and help people to play in a collaborative manner that's fun for everyone." Which is not the conversation you're having. Your conversation seems to be "there is no reason why anyone should want to engage in these themes on a game."

Yes. Can we please get back to this? Because the other debate is going nowhere.

We have FTB as a tool.

We have player cooperation as a tool ("Hey I know your char hates Virgons but can we find a way to work together because I'd like to play with you and not eat crap all the time" "Sure that sounds cool").

Folks have talked about opt-out as a tool, which can work sometimes ("I'm just gonna skip the big debate about women voting rights because I know that's going to be miserable") but I still have yet to hear a good explanation of how you deal with a situation where racism and sexism are a thing and you've got an African American woman trying to be a deputy. Like, seriously... how do you opt out of that?

What other tools are there?

@Ganymede said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I can remember our new associate frustrated and in tears because she had to take yet another day off because of a sick child. She was worried (because I was not a partner at the time) that she might lose her job because she was taking too much time off too soon from her hire.

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm referring to, yes. Statistically, this falls more on women more than men, and especially on single parents.

Now an employer can look at that and say: "Wow, if I hire this lady she might have to take time away from work for her kids - I'll hire this other guy instead because all I care about is hours in seats" or an employer can look at that and say: "Hmm... maybe the fact that we don't allow all parents to take the time they need off for familial obligations is detrimental to their emotional well-being and places an undue burden on one gender and an implicit hiring bias. Maybe we should fix that, huh?"

You see the same thing when it comes to parental and family leave, which often is biased against men.

@bored said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The forum needs to be able to handle that. As usual, I do not care about the how, I am ambivalent among different solutions. I do not begrudge anyone their more polite areas.

Just wanted to note that nobody is suggesting that negative reviews be shunted off to the Hog Pit. Reasonable adults should be able to post a negative review: "I cannot recommend playing on this game because staff did (this bad thing, with facts)" without the entire thread turning into a freaking dumpster fire complete with people posting popcorn GIFs and random snarky commentary to egg on one side or the other. Sadly we've seen more of the latter.

Shifting gears... I agree with @Auspice. If it's an "Ad" thread then it should just be for game staff to post ads/announcements IMHO. There's nothing wrong with having a separate thread for Q&A and discussion (positive and negative, as long as negative doesn't get too deep into the mudslinging). Splitting up positive and negative commentary about the same game always struck me as goofy.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

Well it is a problem if the game runners assume their players are +rolling on a regular basis, and distribute XP based on that assumption.

Sure, but that's one (of many) reasons to not do it that way. The others being the fact that it's easily exploited, that it incentivizes roll-play, and that it runs counter to how most people fundamentally interact with the game.

Similarly when it comes to incentivizing failure, a lot of the scenarios leading to it cannot be summed down to a single roll of the dice. If the Council votes against your IC interests (which they do based on individual scenes leading up to it, the voters' private IC motivations, political maneuvering etc) what is the roll going to be?

I think "what is the roll going to be" is the wrong question. It's coming at it from the assumption that there will/should be a roll involved. It's better IMHO to ask what would be gained by rolling? Does it serve the story? Does it even make sense to roll, or has the PC not even put in the baseline amount of RP/work to make such a thing feasible.

It comes down to what you believe the purpose of rolling is. There are certainly some who just flat-out like the element of randomness it brings. Personally I don't subscribe to that. A world where Han Solo could meet his end tripping on a flight of stairs because he failed a Dex check is not a world I want to RP in.

@tinuviel said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

If I set a game in the Harry Potter universe, I expect you to know what a horcrux is.

That's your choice, naturally, but it's not universal. BSGU welcomes people who are unfamiliar with the theme. The only requirement is that you be willing to learn. Some of our most active/contributing players have never seen the show, and they do just fine. If I ran a Shadowrun game, I would not expect anybody coming in to know the system or have read the umpteen zillion splat books. I would, however, expect them to read the game's wiki files, which should teach them all the basics they need to know.

It's totally fair for a game to post on their news files: "We expect you to know the theme/system". They can have whatever policies they like.

What I was responding to was @Derp's assertion that in general people would be pissed if you turned up to a game without knowing the system. My experience over dozens of games and multiple decades has been the opposite.

@Runescryer said in MUers in the news?:

The problem I have with @Nymeria's approach is that it's forcing players that want to play non-white characters to justify that character's existence. To a degree that white characters don't have to meet.

Yeah, again I think it comes down to the nuances of how it's handled.

Take TGG's Guadalcanal campaign for instance. I couldn't play a female front-line marine because that just wasn't a thing in 1942, and I had to work harder to explain what the heck my Australian missionary nurse character was doing there.

But that didn't bother me. It wasn't some arbitrary decision based on someone's narrow interpretation of 'canon'; it was a well-understood aspect of the setting. More importantly, there was no judgement attached. Staff was encouraging and accepting of those of us with atypical characters.

So just for the record... the Vault Girl "apology" thread? The one where folks are literally telling each other to f-- off, jumping down each others' throats about who has more right to be upset about what, quibbling over RL gender (WTF people, it's 2018 - can we not start a war about how someone identifies online?), etc.? The one that's so blatant that people are posting actual dumpster fire GIFs? That right there is the kind of thing that those of us asking for more moderation have been talking about.

I can only assume the mods are aware of it since they've been posting in the thread. And if people haven't been flagging posts like mad, that says something too about what the community is willing to tolerate. (I didn't flag personally because I was just curious to see how far it would be allowed to go.)

Allowing Jerry Springer level crap persist in the "Mildly Constructive" forum sends a message about what behavior is allowed, and sets a tone that pervades the rest of the forums.

More constructively, I think that the "Mildly" part of "Mildly Constructive" is just too much of a gray area for people to handle, and it's too easy to stray over the line when tempers get heated. I'd suggest a reshuffling of categories:

Constructive

• Game Dev
• Interest Checks ((new category for pre-MU ad posts that seem to be a rage lately))
• Tastes Less Gamey
• Coding
• How-Tos

Gloves Off

• Game Reviews ((new category where people can post reviews, including full-out negative ones and public service announcements warning about certain admins))
• Peeves ((new category -- split off the RL Anger / Peeves threads to here)
• Hog Pit
• Politics

You could maybe color-code the little icons next to the category names, or put --Constructive-- --Gloves Off-- after the thread titles to delineate which goes where.

Up to you whether all of the Gloves Off topics are opt-in like the Hog Pit or only Hog Pit / Politics. They all kinda seem the same to me. But at least making a clear distinction between Constructive/Gloves-Off sets a clear expectation about what's tolerable where.

ETA: @Ganymede did say something while I was typing this, but the flamey posts are still there for anyone wandering through Mildly Constructive to read and say: "Oh okay, this is what goes on here."

ETAx2: Someone moved it to the Hog Pit, so thank you.

@Sunny said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

@Jennkryst It's also why we shouldn't do it any more in the first place, because those are stupid hassles to enforce. I don't have time to RP in two hours, I have to go to bed. If I can't RP -- actually rp, not halfass 'work around' stuff -- I'm going to go find something else to do.

This. I don't do alts, and unless your character has a reason to go hopping around the galaxy, having multiple planets cuts you out of a lot of RP. Having OOC plot rooms and communicators doesn't help if you have no connections to anybody outside your home planet. This was my issue on several Star Wars games. Obviously SW and other space games still work in spite of this, but there's no denying it's an issue that stymies RP.

@arkandel said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

'responsibility' players can be expected to sign up on, and what are the limits?

For me, the only people who should have responsibility are the staff. Everyone else is there just to play the game and have fun. Who wants a second job?

Courtesy is more important in player-player interactions. If someone is your employee/SO/sibling, then it's courteous to give them a scene on a reasonably frequent basis to support that relationship. If someone is participating in your plot, then it's courteous to reply to their questions in a timely fashion and not leave them hanging.

If you're not going to be courteous to your fellow players, then you can't really get too bent out of shape if they decide to go seek their fun elsewhere. This is something that I feel is better handled by "playground rules" than by any game policy.

@krmbm said in Tyche Banned:

It has happened. Several times. They don't last, 'cause people get bored.
There's a reason the Hog Pit accounts for ~45% of the posts on MSB: it's more fun in there.

And yet the non-hogpit section is still relatively active given the comparably small size of our community. There are clearly folks willing to engage in mildly constructive discourse.

I think the larger problem is that MUSHing is a (relatively) tiny and stagnant community. There just isn't that much to talk about that's actually relevant to the hobby and constructive. Most of the activity here has nothing to do with MUSHes at all, in or out of the hogpit.

@golgoth said in A new platform?:

Shit, I don't know Ruby / Ruby on Rails and now I'm sitting here thinking how hard it might be to implement all of this stuff for AresMUSH.

FWIW you don't have to - it's already implemented. Web-based mail, bbs and jobs come out of the box.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

@faraday said in A new platform?:

If the bulk of the web portal and basic systems are already built

Giving us even more to re-design to bring the hobby into last decade.

:helpless shrug: If folks are going to re-design mail, BBS, finger/profile, repose and whatnot just for the hell of it when it's already built for them, they're not my target audience. Go use Evennia. Seriously. (I don't mean that in a bad way either. Evennia is a great building kit for making your own thing.)

Ares is for the folks who see no reason to re-invent the wheel just to make it look a little different, and just want to run a game. Take all the pre-built stuff, add whatever game-specific stuff you need (which for most games will be very little if we have a stable of different CG systems ready to go) and you're off to the races.

@rahnevyn said in Armageddon MUD:

When I mentioned being in the wrong neighborhood and getting mugged as a mistake earlier (like back on page... 10?..) I meant it as a mistake in terms of a "I have heard these warnings, but don't heed them" sense rather than a "Whoops, you took a wrong turn, now you die!" sense. Just to clarify.

I think that's been a big part of the problem in this thread is all the seemingly-contradictory information.

"You won't be punished for being a newbie" vs "People will totally react to your faux pas without breaking character, as if you're a moron, or take advantage of you for making a mistake"

"You have to just learn things for yourself, like where water is and where to hunt" vs "Here's a handy map and a helpfile describing how to hunt"

"There's no OOC channels in-game, why would you even want such a thing?" vs "It's totally fine to use +ooc for brief questions, that's what it's there for"

"Your welcoming might very well be a mugging and/or a murder, just roll with it" vs "We're here to help the new players and there are tons of OOC and IC warning messages"

Etc. And that's all from the people advertising the game - that's not even counting the obvious critics. Personally? It's not a game for me either way and can only attribute my continued participation in this thread to temporary insanity. But folks trying to boil down the dissent to a disagreement about MUDs vs MUSHes are completely missing what folks are actually complaining and/or confused about.

@derp said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

"How do you do this in a way that allows for a diverse range of games like this code allows for without just creating every game from the ground up?"

That's exactly what platforms like Ares and Evennia are working on. Evennia is still young. Ares isn't even done yet. I just wish folks (not you specifically) would give them time to try to do the thing before declaring that the thing can't be done.

It's just too similar in form and function to the quoted-content line, which is making me think that everything is a quote.

@thatguythere said in A new platform?:

@faraday
I fail to see how those being split into two different windows would be better? All that does is make me flip between windows to see things.

Then there's nothing I can say to convince you. Continue enjoying the old systems.

@roz said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

So I'm not likely to play an Ares game that's going to ignore the web portal.

Just for the record - I advised T8S staff not to use the prior web portal release because it was still kind of hacky and buggy and I knew it was getting overhauled anyway. It didn't make sense for them to do a bunch of work porting over their oh-so-pretty wiki style only to have to redo all the design work in the next version. So that part's not really their fault.

@seraphim73 said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

There's currently no doubling up

I think what @Roz meant is that the log is literally already there in the web portal, but you still have to copy/paste to the wiki. Ditto with character pages. You have to update your info in-game (even if you're not using the portal; for example with RP hooks) and then copy/paste to the wiki. While you may not be using the information in two places, it's still more work.

The new version's going to be rolled out on BSGU in the next couple days and I'd be happy to help Blu sort out the style changes to make T8S's version look as close to the wiki as possible when y'all are ready to update.

@surreality said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

Odd question, but... does this mean access to the game itself would only be accessible through the web portal? I may be in the minority but I am one of those folks who likes my MUclient where I have all my colors set up to work with my eyes and brain and all that.

The new version supports joining scenes through the web portal, but the telnet experience is unchanged.

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

How would you completely redo MU* so that it is not command>output in two windows? Is that even a goal here?

It's my goal. Here's a rough prototype of how you might do scenes. Bear in mind it's only a prototype and I've already changed some things in the current web portal implementation. I'll no doubt change it more before it's done. The only reason there's still a telnet interface at all is for backwards-compatibility with existing players who don't want to switch, though that adds a lot of complexity to the codebase.

But as @Arkandel says, we can debate it till the cows come home and frankly I'm tired of defending the idea. I'm building it. People will use it or they won't.

@rnmissionrun said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Evennia has been around for 11 years. I would hardly call that 'young'.

People have been putzing around with it for 11 years, yet it's still on a 0.7 beta release and the first real games only seem to have hit in 2016. @Griatch can comment on its status further, but as far as I can tell it's very much still in development.

ETA: Ares, incidentally, is also 11 years old. I started fiddling around with it back in 2006. And it's not done either.