Best posts made by faraday

@Bobotron said in [Request] Policy Template:

I see people here saying that you don't need to define policies in the most strictest detail, but some of those polices - and people not following them -- are the very things that we bitch about on this forum. And then when it becomes a clusterfuck because there was no policy point to reference, it spirals into insanity.

I respectfully disagree. Things spiral into insanity when people act insane. Having more or fewer policies doesn't change this. I have yet to see anyone flip out and create a 10-page long thread because staff enforced a vague yet sensible policy.

I have, however, seen staff hamstrung in their attempts to deal with a problem player because "well, dang, technically they didn't break rule 602 because of the way it's worded" or "wow this guy totally sucks, but we have to give him three strikes according to the policy; hopefully he won't drive everyone off while we're waiting for him to screw up next."

@Sunny said in [Request] Policy Template:

Why is this needed?

Yes, this exactly. I like to consider "Is this really likely to become an issue?" and "what are the effects if it does become an issue?" Like, I've seen very reactionary policies sometimes. IdiotGuy did something stupid on SomewhereMUSH in 2001 therefore there needs to be a policy to keep someone else from doing the same.

Unless it was a huge catastrophe (pretty rare in my experience), or it happens ten times a year, no - there probably doesn't need to be a policy about it.

@Ninjakitten said in A Lack of Imagination:

I'm always worried I won't recognize a friend or relative I haven't seen in a while when I go to see them again. But the thing with the latter is I virtually always do. I took an online test recently (part of a study, rather than a 'for fun' type) and my result came back as solidly average. So I think I'm actually not notably bad at facial recognition, but because I store them somewhere I can't 'see', I feel a lot worse at it than I really am. I don't have the precision of description for faces to feel confident in connecting what I have with what's really there when I see it.

I had a similar experience with an online test with celebrity images. And yet when I go to a family reunion I sit in front of people I've known all my life and have to second-guess myself like... "Is that so and so?" I'll go to a parent-teacher conference worrying about whether I'm going to recognize my kid's new teacher. There's definitely a challenge there, whatever that particular test may say.

I wonder if the celebrity test was more of a false-positive, because it falls more into pattern recognition. Like I know that's Chris Pratt more because I'm pattern-matching it against a specific image from a movie I saw, rather than something from my own memory.

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

Honestly from what I have seen actual moderation is less the issue and more how posters start to behave, it usually becomes you said something negative about something or disagreed with someone I liked so now I attack your post for being overly negative and I have seen that sort of thing be every much a dogpile as anything that has happened on here or Wora. That becomes my issue.

If posters are misbehaving that's exactly the sort of thing more moderation would be intended to solve. I agree with you that currently the mods don't jump in usually, and that's as they intend it. I would argue that somebody overreacting to criticism and launching into personal attacks/dogpiles is just as guilty as somebody who goes around hurling insults. Moderation should go both ways.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Saving Pages to the Database:

Pages/PMs feel like the one thing I need to log on to do, everything else is more or less possible through the webportal atm.

This is actually why I'm not inclined to make it game-configurable unless the community is overwhelmingly in favor of it. I mean obviously a game can do whatever they want with the code, but I don't need to make an easy 'off' switch if most players view it as core game functionality

@thatonedude said in What is your turning point?:

I never mind a: <name> waves. or <name> salutes. or <name> pages, "Hey hey, how goes?"
Everyone else thinks this is bad?

I don't mind. I do the same. I mean, like... you're just saying hi. Isn't that what folks traditionally do when someone arrives?

Now if within the first five minutes it's like: "Hi! You ready to do that scene we talked about?" then yeah -- dude, chill.

Tangentially - Scheduled RP makes me uncomfortable. It just doesn't mesh well with folks who have RL unpredictability -- kids, migraines, work call, whatever. I'll just end up stressing out over potentially disappointing someone and then having to apologize for it. Big events - yeah, I view that as a necessary evil. But for day to day stuff I'll see you when I see you.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

I cannot really relate to this notion (anymore) as a game developer though - the immediacy of the telnet just doesn't outweigh the advantages of a proper development environment (to me).

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. On many games, players aren't allowed to code much (if anything) anyway. If you want in-game player-accessible scripting support, Penn/Tiny/Rhost is good for that.

Assuming you start with a sane Python dev environment, installing consists of activating a python virtualenv (a standard practice for Python programs), cloning the evennia repo and then running pip install -e evennia.

I think this is the core difference between Evennia and AresMUSH, which is my MUSH server in development. Evennia seems to be more of an open framework - "build whatever you want" - with a presumption that you are tech-savvy enough that you've either started with a Python dev environment or can figure it out.

Ares' goal is to be more of a "MUSH in a box" that someone with no server experience and no coder could get up and running themselves. (Assuming they are content with what the out-of-the-box code can be configured to do.)

That is the principal reason why I opted not to put a web front-end on Ares. Sure it's very cool. It could absolutely be done. But it increases the server and code maintenance requirements and complexity significantly.

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

"Hmm, it looks like something went wrong..." is not just useless, it's fucking annoying.

Sometimes there's nothing more to say. Not all software errors have 'here's what you can do...' solutions.

I doubt it would be any less annoying to have a message like: "You shouldn't be seeing this message. If you are, then somebody screwed up something somewhere in the code and we're going to have to go on a scavenger hunt to figure out who and what. Until then maybe try again? Good luck." Because most of the time, that's the honest truth.

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

The idea would be to warn first, then act, other than for repeat offenses.

And @Sunny and I have expressed concerns that this approach basically gives the first instigator on a thread a free pass for mudslinging, knowing that all they're going to get is a warning. Meanwhile everyone else is (theoretically) handcuffed in their ability to respond but (in reality, based on historical evidence) will probably just escalate.

If it gets moved to the pit, where the mudslinging belongs, then those inclined to do so can at least respond. And those who don't want to see that crap don't have to look at it.

It's like graffiti. The solution to someone spraypainting your house isn't to say "hey please knock it off" and then leave the graffiti there. That's just giving them a pat on the wrist with no real consequence, and leaving your house a spraypainted mess that basically invites future graffiti.

I keep hearing different messages from @Arkandel , @Auspice and @Ganymede about how this will be handled and I think I (and others) are understandably confused. If you want to say "hey it's gonna vary by mod - deal with it" then fine. But otherwise it sounds like y'all are contradicting each other and it's confusing.

@Auspice said in King of Sex Mountain:

aka developing a sex game in FS3 (sorry @faraday).

Hey, Ares/FS3 is about enabling other people to build the games they want, not the game I want. Good luck!

(Btw, Ares has a parallel mechanism for registering alts with tags, without requiring player handles.)

@sunny said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

@arkandel said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

See why a wiki is better, g'dammit?

No.

ETA: People following the rules, and the rules being enforced consistently, is better.

Yeah, still not seeing the value of the wiki. I mean... "don't post to the ad threads unless you're the OP". How hard is that for people to follow? We're all (allegedly) adults here.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

This is probably true, from our previous discussion of the differences. Of course, once you have the server running, the minimal "Python dev environment" in Evennia's case is basically a text editor and that's it.

Well, yeah, but I'm talking about getting the server itself up and running. I've had a bunch of people give up trying to run a game because the PennMUSH install was too intimidating (and it's like a FTP and a couple 'make' commands). Devs take it for granted because we live in a world of command lines and shell scripts, but I think it's important to keep in mind that you've got basically an entire generation now that's never had to use a C:\ prompt. SSH? SFTP? Text editor? You just get blank looks.

These are smart people, but their experience and foundational tech knowledge is completely different than what's required to run a traditional MUSH server.

@RightMeow It's definitely not just you. Google ADHD and Time Blindness and you'll find zillions of articles on the subject. Here's a good one - How it really feels to be time-blind with ADHD:

Our perception of time — or lack thereof — lays the foundation for our biggest struggles. As Dr. Russell Barkley explains it, ADHD “disrupts the fabric of time.” ... Neurotypical people may wonder, what could be so difficult about looking at your watch? How could you not know how long it takes to get ready for work in the morning? How could you not have realized you didn’t have time to mow the lawn before our date?

Like @Sparks said - there are so many things that I never realized were An Actual Thing until I started researching ADHD. My family always used to talk about "Faraday Time" like I existed in some alternate dimension where time passed at a different rate for me than for everybody else. Now I know it's just "ADHD Time".

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

This is because we are not speaking with a unified voice here.

OK but the way it came across was Ark saying basically "This is what we are considering doing..." which has a very strong implication that you moderators had already discussed this amongst yourselves and come up with a joint solution. So to hear you and Auspice then saying completely different things is honestly a bit baffling.

ETA: It's one thing to say "Hey let's brainstorm". It's another to say "This is what the mods are planning to do - feedback?" and then see the feedback elicit "But that's not what we want to do" from the mods.

@bored said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Playing a smuggler, your ship is going to matter. It might not matter that it rolls exactly +8 for 4d8 damage, but it being a scrapyard junker jury rigged to chaotic perfection vs. a well-maintained high end craft matters a lot to the story you're telling. Somehow, you need to acknowledge that the two things are different and it matters, or you're losing something both in the story and in any sense of mechanical verisimilitude. The same goes for a bounty hunter's kit being part of their identity, or representing a lightsaber as something other than 'just a sword.'

Of course that stuff is going to matter, but the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett's armor didn't get the story they have because there were stats and systems attached to them. They literally got that from the story and writing surrounding them. I just did a Storium game where the ship was very much a character in the story, and nary a stat in sight.

I have nothing against folks who want a RPG/simulator with an equipment list. To each their own fun! But I disagree with the notion that these things are in some way essential to the RP experience.

Some novels are really really awful. Some RP is really good. Not NYTimes bestseller good, but still "good enough I'll go out of my way to read it" good.

Quality is not related to medium.

And even though MU writing is not the same as novel writing, you can use MUs to practice certain aspects of the mechanics involved because they share a common core.

@Caggles said in Well, this sums up why I RP:

Yeah, but some of it was still just about Roan's precious hair - the big story is great, but the little stories can be the things that make the game for you.

Lol yeah. But even Roan, shallow hair-obsessed dude he could be sometimes, had a story arc.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

I could personally not imagine writing a full game in anything lisp-like, but that just shows my bias. All the more power to you.

I think it depends on what you consider a "full game". +finger, +who, room parent descriptions... those are relatively easy to customize and learn once you learn a few MUSHcode basics. Where the gap exists is in the more advanced systems - sophisticated chargen, combat, economy, etc. There I respectfully disagree with @krmbm that you do have to be a pretty advanced MUSHcoder to accomplish. That's why a lot of people use Theno's WoD system or my FS3. Of course, many games don't need those things.

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

Correct apostrophe use is critical to understanding homonyms.

Yes but as with many things in writing, there is no one universal "correct" when it comes to punctuation style. Even the two major styles (AP and Chicago) don't always agree. For example:

https://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-forming.html

Not disagreeing with @Sunny's examples in particular, because as editor, their literal job is to be the arbiter of style for their organization. Just a corollary peeve that the grammar "rules" we learn in school often aren't rules at all, but styles.

I don't really get why it needs to be marked at all? If you're gonna quit a site, just... don't come back? Marking it as banned sends a weird message.

@Ghost said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@faraday here's an idea

BSG may have run its course, but the same methods/FS3 could be applied to an Apocalypse-Era Terminator game based out of a safe zone while rebels are fighting Skynet.

Belatedly... I’m sure that would work system-wise.

My experience with BSG though is that folks are generally more interested in the Top Gun aspects than the post-apoc guerilla aspects, so I wonder if there’d be traction for battling SkyNet in a ruined world. (Unless you subscribe to the Salvation timeline where they’ve got A10s for some inexplicable reason.)

In a similar vein though is Falling Skies, which is probably going to be my next project.

@surreality The only problem with something like that is that you're basically stuck with the worst of both formats. The ideal way to chunk and display info on small plain-text terminal windows is very different than the ideal way to do so on a wiki. That's not to say you're wrong for doing so; I just don't think the pros outweigh the cons just to support those unwilling to open up a web browser. I haven't had a game with actual in game news files for over a decade. People do just fine.