@mietze First person accounts ARE evidence, but it has to be balanced with what the other person has to say about it and their credibility too. I’m not weighing in on this specific instance because I don’t know enough about it. I’m just saying that in general it’s not easy to sort messes like these out.
@arkandel said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:
I can be told I was wrong in insisting you play it out with me.
I don't think it's quite that black and white though:
"Your character is an emotional train wreck and I can't deal with that. I insist on you toning it down if you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with my character."
"My character is an emotional train wreck. If you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with our characters, you have to take the good with the bad."
Neither of these approaches is really a good way of handling things, even if one is driven by "I'm uncomfortable". They're both insisting / making ultimatums, which is a poor approach to take in any collaborative endeavor.
It's really not about right and wrong (unless someone is being out-and-out creepy/offensive) it's more about communication and negotiation.
Maybe this is a common comic game thing, but this policy really baffles me:
Relationship RP and activity of the sort is not protected or enforced under our Continuity policy and are generally considered to be retconned the moment a player leaves a character. We don't really want to see anything more than "Golly jee willickers, I really like Jean Grey!" in people's +canon.
How does that work? Like... okay, I've spent six months RPing a BFF relationship with Ganymede's character, we've shared our deepest darkest secrets and had loads of adventures, there are tons of logs on the wiki, etc. Then Gany gets bored and quits and someone else takes over the character and ... all that gets erased? I'm supposed to now invent some kind of alternate reality for my character where none of it ever happened?
I get that a new player will never be exactly the same as the old one and should be free to take the character in different directions. (We have a falling out, drift apart, whatever.) But to not be bound at all by the in-game continuity makes it seem like the game doesn't have a continuity, which is kinda an alien concept to me.
The wiki looks very nice btw.
@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:
Every other entertainment source has an end. A film ends, a book ends. The only thing I can really relate it to is perhaps a long-running television show that refuses to end in spite of all evidence that it should. Stories end, and so should games. And that's something players should have on their list of things to expect right out of the gate.
Yes, but I think that "long-running TV series" is exactly the mental model that people come to MUSHes with. Many games are literally based on TV shows.
Some games embrace the model outright with "arcs" and "seasons" but when you strip a MU down and look at the basic underpinnings... they're all pretty much exactly like nighttime TV dramas, right down to "OMG what else could possibly happen to this poor guy" (re: lead character) and "jump the shark" story moments when the storytellers start to run out of good ideas.
So the fact that game-runners don't plan for an ending and people invested in characters don't want them to leave the "show" seems perfectly understandable and natural to me. It's exactly how most folks approach their TV shows.
@collective said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):
With respect, that's kind of a feature of a comic book game, rather than a bug. ... I know that if my first days on a game were expected to be in scenes where some random stranger wants to RP what a bastard my character is for breaking up with their character, I'd nod politely, pretend I had to run an errand, log out and never, ever come back.
That's fair. Like I said, I've never played comic games which I way I prefaced my initial question with "Maybe this is a standard thing on comic games..." What you just described (holding a char to RP based on their previous player) is the standard, accepted norm on games I've played.
I know that if my days on a game included walking into a scene with someone I'd spent months playing as a BFF and then being treated like a complete stranger? I'd never come back either. To each their own. As long as @Enoch's policy is clear one way or the other, folks know what they're getting into and decide if it's a game for them.
@kanye-qwest said in What drew you to MU*?:
I worked all night at an extremely undemanding job, in front of a PC, and I was bored. A friend was like "I stay up all night playiing this text game, come try it" and I was like "sounds fake but ok".
That's similar to my experience. I worked the late-night shift at the college computer lab. We couldn't install video games, and there wasn't much of an internet to surf at the time, but I could MU from a terminal window.
@rnmissionrun said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:
If I had known that you were open to people running "private beta" games with AriesMUSH, I would have hit you up ages ago!
Not games plural - there's just one. And if you had to hear about all the times Kraken had to deal with horrible merge conflicts or redo his code based on me changing things, you might feel otherwise 
Anyway, he and @Seraphim73 have provided a lot of good feedback.
@tinuviel I think that's pretty much game design 101. If a significant percentage of people are interested in X, staff is probably going to do more X. If hardly anyone is interested in Y, staff can either try to figure out why and adjust it (if it's something they think has value) or ditch it. That's not something unique to Arx or Blizzard.
@thugheaven said in Armageddon MUD:
What I was trying to get across is: Some people won’t break character to show you the right thing to do or say. That’s one of the essentials of good story telling right? Show don’t tell. I know it can feel like it’s a personal affront to you the player, but most people aren’t doing it to make you feel bad or silly or haze newbies. Give it a chance because it might lead you somewhere good.
No, it really isn't one of the essentials of good storytelling, and this blind and repetitive insistence that it's the only good way to play is alienating people here far, far more than the fact that you're advertising a MUD instead of a MUSH.
What you're describing - reacting ICly to an obvious OOC misunderstanding - is not only uncommon on most MUSHes, it's considered downright jerk-ish behavior. Not because we're wusses who get affronted by challenge, but because we find it silly when people don't acknowledge that the character should know things that you, the player, don't know.
@arkandel said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:
Especially before the actual design of how the wiki will work or who will be able to edit what has been completed yet.
Fair enough. I'm coming at it from more of the philosophical meaning of "wiki", which is community-edited, moderator-curated. You can certainly use wiki software as more of a locked-down CMS if you do enough gymnastics with permissions.
And I don't think you can argue it would give us options in terms of seeking out games - which is what ads are about - we don't currently have.
But, um... I can and do argue that. I think that an "Ads" section, which was locked-down to JUST ads and updates (and not 27 pages about why people don't like a skill system, had bad experiences, think the forum policies need work, or heaven-knows-what other tangents) is perfectly useful.
Just look at the Playlist threads. They're fine. The owner puts all the relevant info in the first post and 'bumps' the thread when they update it. Occasionally there's some "I knew you when" chatter, but it's pretty limited and tame.
A wiki could organize the info better, sure, but it's a lot more overhead and yet another place to check for information that I think could be addressed perfectly well right here.
ETA: Oh, and if the ads thread were JUST ads, there's no reason not to delete them when a game closes. Thus reducing clutter and helping people find games more easily.
@thugheaven said in Armageddon MUD:
If you can point me to a game that’s free of players like that, I’d gladly play it. As far as I know there is none.
There are plenty of MUSHes where that sort of behavior is not tolerated. Now of course bad eggs happen and have to be dealt with, but that particular example is not something that happens often enough to bear mention.
@thugheaven said in Armageddon MUD:
Also you keep describing something that doesn’t happen. It simply doesn’t.
You yourself have said it does, repeatedly, by saying that people will react IC to people making OOC mistakes based on misunderstandings. Case in point:
@thugheaven said in Armageddon MUD:
What I was trying to get across is: Some people won’t break character to show you the right thing to do or say. That’s one of the essentials of good story telling right?
I'm not saying you're wrong for playing it that way. Your game, your prerogative. I'm saying you're wrong (IMHO) for insisting that it's an essential - or even preferred - way to play. I'm also saying that playing that way on the vast majority of MUSHes would quickly get you in trouble.
@evilcabbage said in Armageddon MUD:
i think you will find the opposite.
If you actually read those articles you might find a common theme arguing against using quotes for emphasis. Scare quotes cast doubt on the validity of something, so using them for emphasis really has the exact opposite of the intended effect.
If you saw a window sign for ‘homemade’ stew or a label promising ‘delicious’ waffles, would the punctuation affect how you imagine the food? What about a cosmetic product that’s ‘good’ for your hair, or a claim that a service is ‘free’? Are you feeling trustful? source
Kind of like trying to brow-beat people about grammar on an "advertisement" thread.
@bobgoblin said in ROGUE: It is coming...:
This was the approach taken by a sw game not long ago that met with burning crashing. Everything was about the rebellion. Players wanted to do their own things and the disconnect left people scratching their heads.
There are all kinds of reasons why games fail. Attributing one game's failure to one particular design decision is a shaky proposition.
@tnp said in Now Open! Welcome to Lovecraft:
Because there's an 'amount of RP' threshold to keep my interest. When it's not met
Yeah, I sympathize with @Botulism but this is not really something you can put on the players. It's a game. Can you imagine if you booted up a video game on Playstation or something at it was all: "Sorry, you can't play right now for (reasons)." How many times would you try before you just threw up your hands? It takes a minimum critical mass to sustain a game. It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:
Consider staff -- good staff -- to be like mandated reporters, people. If you ring the bell, they will act.
I think that's a fair policy to have on your game. In absence of such a policy though, I would feel it a breach of trust if someone came to me in confidence and I violated that. It also makes it harder to actually get the person to cooperate in giving you details/logs/etc. if they feel they can't trust you.