Best posts made by faraday

@ominous said in RL Anger:

Can confirm that it's a thing and it's mostly drug related.

I don't think there's much debate in scientific circles about whether it's "a thing" - the debate is whether it's a separate thing deserving of its own name ("excited delirium") vs. something that is already covered by the symptoms of other conditions (drug use, psychosis, etc.) That is a question for the researchers, and why it's not in the DSM.

None of that even remotely excuses those bully cops falsely trying to use it as a shield for their abuses. It's appalling how often it happens. (ETA: Not referring to your story there, just to be clear.)

@tinuviel said in The trappings of posing:

@faraday Almost like any culture or sub-culture.

Okay? I mean, maybe you run in some pretty rough sub-cultures, but if someone bows to me in greeting at a party, I'll raise a curious eyebrow but I'm not going to be all: "Wow, what an idiot. I never want to invite him to another party."

We're talking about things like using you or past tense or tabs in writing. It's not like these are alien ideas in prose.

@surreality said in The trappings of posing:

This is partly why I ask so many times about the things people think newbies should know.

I tried to capture some of them in my MUSH 101 tutorial, but yeah - I think a lot of them are just subconscious.

@apos said in Earning stuff:

Any game owner has to choose whether they want to obscure any information on their setting for story purposes, knowing full well that if they do so, they will be accused of favoritism and stuff like that down the road. You just will.

FTFY

But seriously - it doesn't matter how transparent or well-intentioned you are. Some players will get their noses out of joint no matter what you do. Do what's best for the game.

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

So is the "[citation needed] but all proof/examples from the past are invalid 'cause they're old" argument.

If "all proof/examples from the past" boil down to "this one group of folks tried something once a decade ago and it failed" then yeah - I'm not going to consider that a very compelling argument.

If you don't like that place, don't read it. But don't try to decide for the rest of us that it has no value, and we'd all be better off without it.

I'm allowed to have my own opinion about whether such a place is a bad thing for the community just as much as you're allowed to have an opinion about whether such a place is a good thing. I'm not deciding anything because I'm not in charge. What I'm asking for is moderation to keep the dang hog pit posts where they allegedly belong.

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I want a web-only 'MUSH' more than anything.

As @Tat pointed out (thanks btw) - for all my naysaying in this thread, I'm basically angling Ares so that you can do everything from the web someday. It's not a goal for 1.0 because I don't think most people want that, but it's still on the horizon.

That doesn't mean forcing people to the web. The telnet side still exists, until the day when some game decides it's superfluous and turns it off. It just means making more and more stuff accessible via web in ways that are oh-so-much-easier than dealing with +this and +that foo=bar/baz.

The thing is... my idea for a "web only MUSH" may be different than other peoples'. The idea of a grid? Even in the telnet version, I'm moving away from that with my scene system. By refocusing our RP around the idea of scenes, the grid becomes unnecessary. Give folks a map and some pre-defined locations/descs and they can go to to town. Channels and pages? We can bundle them together into an in-game chat system that works just like Slack or Discord. Etc.

I don't think there's value in just re-creating the old world with a web GUI slapped on top. I think that making a good web experience requires a paradigm shift.

@greenflashlight That's relatable.

@Wretched Right? ADHD treatment is so not ADHD friendly.

@miss-demeanor Well you CAN do all of those things in Firefly too, but almost nobody does. Everyone wants to capture the feel of the show, which is centered around a small ship crew/family.

@apos said in Managing Player Expectations:

And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.

I think this is why we keep going off into the weeds. If everyone's reasonable, then having mismatched expectations is simply not an issue at all. A player might be mildly bummed or even leave the game if it's not what they expected. A staffer might sigh at having the same thing asked 27 times and having to patiently explain why that's not in their vision. Sure it's nice if you can avoid this by clearly stating expectations up front, but it is, quite simply, not a problem.

The problem, to me, is what @Arkandel said earlier: It's the people who aren't reasonable who take up the majority of the effort. I disagree that this is a clear-cut disciplinary issue, because it's usually not somebody screaming at you. More often, it's somebody who is making your admin life perpetually difficult because they just can't seem to reconcile their tenacious expectations of how the game "should be" with how the game actually is.

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

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

Your mom.

She is a very nice woman thank you very much.

I'm sure she's quite lovely.

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

And people wanna post their random flyby criticisms and throw shade without it ever being thrown at them so I dunno how you do that and make a healthy environment that allows people to talk about flaws in games or people without it becoming personal.

Uh... by not throwing shade? I mean, not all criticism has to be rendered with a sledgehammer, right? You can say "I don't like something" without turning it into a personal attack like "I don't like this thing you built and I think you're dumb for having built it and ZOMG can't you even see how dumb this is what's the matter with you?" There are things in this hobby that are objectively horrible and probably don't deserve kid gloves, but the vast majority of these flamefests are over disagreements as trivial as whether somebody likes chocolate or vanilla.

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

All of this may be true, but good games differ from one another. Your package may have all of the great features we've come to know and love, but I don't think, for example, that the developers are interested in coding up special, unique features for each game.

Of course if you want special, unique features you'll need a coder. That will always be true. But right now you need a coder even if you don't want special unique features, and that's silly.

Systemless games + Games willing to run FS3 + Games willing to run a simple "descriptive stat" system (like many comic games) ... all of these will be enabled out of the box with zero code in Ares. And that's not even counting games that can be enabled it somebody does a drop-in plugin for a new system.

And if somebody does want custom code? Unless they're already a kung-fu MUSHcode master, it's going to be way way way easier to learn the new systems than the old.

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

Engineers only have to make it work in theory. Not in practice.

Huh? That's literally the opposite of any engineer I've ever interacted with. Electrical, mechanical, software... we have to make actual tangible things that work in practice.

@arkandel said in Social Systems:

And if that's the case no one buys social stats, and people complain there are only combat monsters around. Well, there's a reason for it.

Personally I'm okay with that, if the alternative is strong-arming me into playing my character in a way that feels incongruous with the character's personality, core values, etc.

But I don't think it has to be as all-or-nothing as you're making it out to be. You can use social stats against NPCs. If you run a primarily PvE game, then those stats are still valuable.

And if you're running a non-consent PvP game? Honestly ... good luck with any system. I think 30 years of MU history and a zillion discussions on these boards have aptly demonstrated the sour grapes that result from pitting strangers against each other in a persistent environment

@arkandel said in Respecs.:

It holds zero water. If that was the case no character in nearly any game should pick up new skills at a high level after CGen; it takes going to medical school for years to become a surgeon after all, so if you started with Medicine 1 you should never raise it past, say, 2 - if even that. The same thing applies to melee; you don't become a kung fu master or gain a BJJ elite belt quickly 'realistically'.

But... that's exactly the path that some systems take. I wouldn't allow somebody to go from First Aid 1 to "expert surgeon" in the game for precisely the reasons you describe. You may not like it, and that's fine, but to claim the argument holds no water seems uncharitable. Managing IC plausibility is a thing for some people.

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

@faraday I agree all those specific things are not constructive and should be subject to moderation even in Mildly Constructive (and if any of them are me, my bad). That said, I still think there's levels of skin thickness, hostility and defensiveness across the entire spectrum of forum posters where it would be beneficial to have a designated high moderation area.

But just to be clear -- those are the only kinds of things I'm asking to be moderated. That's it. That's all. Stuff that even you agree doesn't belong in the constructive area.

Seriously, there were what - 10 pages of various people (including you) arguing about FS3? Only two or three of those comments went over the line for me. So for me - it's not at all about needing a "high-moderation zone" it's just about moderating the stuff that already doesn't belong in mildly constructive according to the current policies.

Now I can sympathize with @ThatGuyThere's concern that moderation will go overboard and stifle any sort of criticism, but that's not what I want either. You can't debate if you can't criticize ideas.

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@lotherio It's kind of a catch 22, if we code it using different commands, then people will complain about it being new syntax and not what they're used to. If we don't, then we are not being welcoming to new players

It's only a catch-22 if we stick to the command line. That's the beauty of moving things to the web.

Setting that aside, you're right. I mean, with Ares I literally had to code everything from scratch. Pages, movement, who, bbs... everything. I could have made the syntax anything my heart desired.

But, y'know, I actually wanted MUSHers to play it, and they wouldn't have done so if I changed the syntax. They flat out wouldn't. So to @Lotherio's point - I didn't stick to the existing bbpost syntax out of laziness, I did it as a survival mechanism.

If folks would have accepted something different? I'd do what almost literally every other command-line tool out there does these days by using named arguments.

bbs post --subject Hey look at this --message This is so much more intuitive to the other 99% of the population who are not MUSHers.

ETA: I did make some tweaks to make it more approachable to new folks. Like renaming dig to build and ditching the +/@ prefixes. But even there I had to keep the old syntax/aliases for the veterans.

@ganymede You are awesome. Here's a cute kitty to relax by.

@seraphim73 said in Social Systems:

I think, however, that it all comes down to one singular point: Trust.

Yes, but that's kind of core to why we have stats at all. If everyone trusted each other to play reasonably or (for GMs) to judge situations reasonably, we wouldn't need social stats or physical stats.

@seraphim73 said in Social Systems:

As for social stats vs physical stats, even on PvE games, there's usually at least the possibility of another PC punching your PC (even if they aren't trying to kill yours), and usually you use combat stats for that. But if social stats can't be used against other PCs... well, they're less valuable.

Players use skills against each other all the time in a consensual manner on a PvE game. You might use melee for a sparring practice.

But you can use social skills the same way - consensually. I've seen players roll Bluff or Persuasion or even Seduction in the same sort of playful "let's leave this to chance" way that they would for a pick-up Pyramid game.

And even on a relatively antagonistic PvE game like 100, you still didn't have people running around punching each other on a regular basis. "There might be a PvP barfight once in a blue moon" is really not a compelling argument for "physical stats are more valuable than social stats".

That said, I think physical stats are more valuable on 99% of MUSHes, and it has nothing at all to do with PvP. It's because only 1 out of every 5 (and that's being generous) MU plots even has an opportunity to use social skills to resolve the conflict at all. The other 4 have dozens of opportunities to use combat skills in a single scene.

To tie that back to the OP's original question: Games set up which skills are valuable by setting up opportunities for those skills/systems to be useful. If it's just a chore, or a tool to bludgeon other people over the head, nobody's going to use it.

This also has nothing in particular to do with social stats btw. If I wanted Technician to be as valuable as Firearms on BSGU, I'd need to run one Tech plot (with multiple chances to use the skill in the scene) for every combat plot.

@roz said in Open Sheets?:

All I'm saying is that both of these perspectives -- people who prefer closed sheets vs open sheets -- have pros and cons and neither is inherently indicative of player or game quality.

Totally agree. It's a preference thing.

I, for instance, love metagaming.

Trying to run into a new character for RP? Oh - look, your sheet says your guy is into playing basketball. So's mine. Let's run into each other on the basketball court.

Looking for story hooks? Wow - your guy's got a really interesting dark secret that intersects with mine. Let's work together to make a cool story about that.

It's only inherently bad if it's abused. When used for good, it can be great.

I can totally understand the preference of wanting to maintain the mystery and put blinders on to information your character doesn't know for immersion/easier tracking/etc. That's cool. This isn't a question of right or wrong, it's a question of different play styles.

And to the "why would you want to know the story of a movie beforehand?" comments (which I can't find now) ... for me a MUSH isn't like a movie that you're watching, it's a story that you're writing. I wouldn't sit down with a co-author of a novel all: "ZOMG don't tell me anything about those characters!" That would be absurdly ineffective. I understand not everyone views MUSHes that way -- it's the age-old story/game continuum. But it might help to illuminate why some folks would want to know more details while others might consider it more like spoilers.

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

Like, Tempest's first post that started the genosha split was probably not intended as an attack but saying, 'Hey doing this will make your game fail' whether it's right or wrong is something that's pretty likely to start a fight.

That is a pretty serious mischaracterization of why that thread was split. Sure, it started out as "hey doing this will make your game fail", but then people started chiming in with increasingly-hostile rants about how all MUSHes are basically derivative crap and the code for anything other than Arx required no effort. That's not civil. That's not even remotely constructive. And the final straw was someone calling me "tiresome and disingenuous", which may be mild by hog pit standards but is still pretty blatantly a personal attack. There's no justification for any of that in a civil debate.

The reason debates don't stay civil around here is because a good many people around here don't value civility. They have stated repeatedly that they'd rather the whole forum be gloves-off. There's really no incentive for them to even try to maintain civility in the non-pit sections of the forum, because the worst thing that happens is the thread gets moved to the pit (which is where they'd rather everything be in the first place) . How in the world is that an effective deterrent?

We do a pretty good job keeping the political flame wars to the politics board. Why can't we keep the MU flame wars to the hog pit? Because the people involved just can't be bothered to rein themselves in.

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

And I'm too old to think there is anything hip, edgy, or valuable of having a website that has a section that condones and even encourages people to be shitty to one another.

That's where I'm at.

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

How come no one has made another forum? Are there others besides TMD?

Personally? Because I took the mods at their word that the mudslinging would be confined to the hog pit. As long as they're still trying to do that, I see no value in trying to split the community in half.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Let's start going through actual UI/UX exercises and proposals.

I’m with @meg that I’m a bit exhausted trying to justify modernizing 30-year-old technology. But I will indulge with one little example:

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Consider the UI of such a game where you have a widget for every way to communicate on a MUSH. You would have to have a popup window (or whatever your UI solution is) for:

Paging - Posing (including: emote, pose, and say) - OOC talk - Places talk (including tt, ttooc, ttpose, et al.) - BBoards - IC Phones, Messengers, Missives, and whatever else your game has - Channels

It makes zero sense to do all those things separately in a web client.

• Pages/Channels/Mail become Chat like Discord/Slack/etc. One’s just public and the other two are private.
• Posing/OOC talk/Places are all just different ways to Add to a Scene.
• BBoards become a Forum.
• Grid/movement would be gone. Choosing/changing location is just an integral part of conducting a scene.

That's what I meant when I talked about a paradigm shift instead of just slapping a web UI onto the current MUSH commands.

As for the UX? You’ll probably want a chat window at the bottom/side of your screen at all times because that's so important. Forum and Scene are things you would use separate tabs for depending on what you felt like dealing with.

And oh-by-the-way nothing stops you from having several tabs for different scenes just as you’d have different windows open in your web client. Difference is - you can do multiple scenes with the same character. No more spoofing or silly OOC puppet nonsense. So many clunky things that we're required to do because of the telnet client restrictions just fall away.

@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And I'm pretty sure that there's lots of room for improvement on what Ares has so far, even. Helpful error messages, tips and hints, auto-calculators, ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

Oh yeah. The current CG is lame compared to what you can do with a responsive javascript framework (which is what I’m working on). Yet even that lame-o web version is a gazillion times easier than doing it in-game.