Best posts made by faraday

@bleys5 said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@faraday Put everything essential to the game ON THE GAME. Wiki sites are nice to supplement, but aren't always easily accessible.

I'm not sure what specifically you're referring to, but I've said several times that I support putting essential game information on the game. That's a no-brainer. But different people have different opinions about what constitutes "essential".

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

Few seem to ever role play a character with Robert Downey Jr as a PB for visual purposes alone, but they role play Robert Downey Jr as...

People do it because people like that. They like to view MU*s as a TV show with actors playing roles. To them... to me, but I am not alone in this... that's part of the fun.

You don't like it, that's cool. I respect your opinion. But why can't we just acknowledge there are different playstyles and preferences? Why does one have to be labeled as the "decline" of the hobby?

@sunnyj Not necessarily. A MUSH needs a critical mass of players to function, because people are turned away when they can't find RP (even bar RP) when they feel like playing. That's why sandboxes often sputter and die.

@macha said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

ABC, Yahoo, etc. It's not just TMZ now.

Check their sources though. Everywhere I've seen is just quoting TMZ.

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

I would argue my wikis are worse than pointless since they contain information that is out of date. I have gotten pages about hooks that were no longer valid for example.

My point though was that if the information on the wiki is auto-synced with the game (which is eminently possible with some of the new servers and some tricks that places like Marvel63 have done with existing servers) then the problem isn't a wiki problem but a stale information problem. If their desc gets out of date, their last name changes because they got married but they forgot to update it, their RP hooks changed and they didn't use +hook/update... yes, that happens even in the game itself. Technology can't force people to update information they don't care about.

What types of plots are going to be going on? Or is it more of a sandbox thing? With so many factions and an entire city as the focus I wonder how you plan to get folks to interact meaningfully.

@derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Tell that to smallpox.
Just saying. We absolutely can eliminate viruses. We've done it before.

from the CDC:

In 1959, the World Health Organization (WHO) started a plan to rid the world of smallpox. Unfortunately, this global eradication campaign suffered from a lack of funds, personnel, and commitment from countries, and a shortage of vaccine donations. Despite their best efforts, smallpox was still widespread in 1966, causing regular outbreaks across South America, Africa, and Asia. ... In late 1975, three-year-old Rahima Banu from Bangladesh was the last person in the world to have naturally acquired variola major.

Smallpox had already been around for centuries and was well-studied. Even then it took a concerted, world-wide effort of eradication spanning almost two decades to finally eradicate it. Also, due to its lethality and detectability, its disease profile is pretty much nothing like covid. Smallpox is also, to date, the only disease completely eradicated worldwide.

So what you're saying is accurate, but it's also not really applicable to covid-19 or most other viruses.

If you try to grade the covid vaccines against a historical unicorn of smallpox, it's only going to lead to disappointment. If you grade them against what they're actually designed to do -- reduce infections, reduce spread, reduce hospitalizations -- they perform amazingly well.

@tnp Haven't we seen how well (not) that works with staff alts?

@Auspice Thanks. But yeah, occasionally Digital Ocean changes their setup and I have to tweak something in the install scripts, but that fortunately doesn't happen too often. Unless there's an unforseen hiccup like that, the self-install should be seamless. If it hits a snag, I'm happy to help.

@silverfox That's amusing. I worked on the same team as my brother for many years. We also looked nothing alike, and our last names didn't match due to marriage. One day a coworker was in my cubicle and just stared in confusion at an old family picture I had on my desk and was like.... "Wait... is that <brother>?" They were thrown for such a loop

@surreality said in Regarding administration on MSB:

This is because while it's not fun to hear, "you're a shit-flinging howler monkey who should die in a fire after being hit by a train and reassembled in a secret government lab full of ex-Nazi sadists!" it's also... ridiculous. It is very hard to take that seriously. It's a lot easier to take something like, "I think your attitude is toxic and you should not be welcome in this community because of it," or "I think you are mentally unstable*," to heart, and be hurt by it, even if the claim is equally absurd in truth.

If someone called me a "shit-flinging howler monkey who should die in a fire" I would be just as hurt by it as someone saying "you are mentally unstable". Both are hurtful, cruel things to say. I frankly don't want to be a part of a community that welcomes either one.

@Meg said in Armageddon MUD:

eta: and i'm not saying 'every bad person in the world'. but is your job as a staffer to protect your players against the staffers you hired or the players you have on your game? i think yes.

I think no. Because if they player isn't doing anything wrong on the game, then what exactly am I 'protecting' them from? The possibility that they might do something bad? That's a slippery slope IMHO.

@Derp said in Armageddon MUD:

Here is the thing: It is not my job to protect you from a player. It is my job to uphold the standards that we set for behaviors in our environment.

Exactly this. I've seen players who were banned from one game flourish on another. I've seen players who are complete a-holes on MSB but perfectly well-behaved on games. It's not the person that's usually the problem, it's the behavior.

Now of course there are always extreme situations that might be exceptions to this. If I know for a fact that someone is a serial harasser, or stalking someone RL, or something really awful like that... I may choose to act differently. But in general I don't think it's staff's job to police off-game behavior. Especially when establishing that proof for an off-game venue is often tough if not impossible.

Without the Shadowrun metahumans it wouldn't really be Shadowrun to me. It's one of the core pillars of the game, along with the Matrix and Magic. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be a fun game to play. Just wouldn't be Shadowrun.

@ixokai said in Regarding administration on MSB:

You're painting with a broad brush and assuming that because there is a dark place (MSB's HOg Pit) and a subset of users snark there, there is a culture of negativity everywhere.

I didn't mean to say everywhere. But I have absolutely seen people leave games or start avoiding other players on games based on the negative stuff that goes on here. (ETA: And I don't mean the public shaming of horrifying behavior. I mean just the everyday 'You're an a-hole' stuff that goes on.) If you haven't experienced that, I'm glad for you. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

@WTFE I was not referring to the existing server bases, but rather the emerging ones like Evennia and Ares that are attempting to incorporate new technologies and paradigms. Sorry if I misunderstood your point; this thread seemed very Evennia-centric.

That said, I would argue that command-line interfaces like Linux/Powershell have not made the sort of stunning "foundational changes" that you're alluding to. MUSHing is, fundamentally, a command-line interface.

Now if you're talking about changing that fundamental foundation, groovy. But as I mentioned, that requires not only a server-side change, but a client-side change as well.

Personally I believe the server should come first. Once you have a server baseline that isn't using 1980's tech and a bizarre variant of a long-dead programming language, you can start talking things like: "OK, how can we extend that server to do cool new things with new clients while still supporting old clients."

I'm not trying to be Steve Jobs here. I'm just trying to take that first baby step.

@Thenomain -- No it was definitely Chicago. The location where the nuke went off in Burning Bright was at the FASA offices on Cermak. All spirits aren't animalistic in SR, though, and if you buy the basic idea of overpopulation-induced sprawls, Seattle makes as much sense as anywhere to be a metroplex given its proximity with a bunch of other cities.

But eh... I confess to being overly invested in the SR sourcebooks (shameless proud plug) so I'm probably not the best person for an objective opinion.

Back to the original topic though, I can't help but wonder... if there are so many things about SR that you don't like, why do SR at all? Why not make it wholly original? SR has almost 30 years of history behind it so I think you're really going to be fighting upstream with prior expectations. The people most likely to be "woot! SR!" are probably just as likely to be put off by an alternate take.

It reminds me of the reimagined Battlestar series, which I think succeeded in spite of fans of the old series, not because of it. It probably would have done just as well (if not better) had it just been something else.

@krmbm said in Regarding administration on MSB:

What we know is that the people here use the Hog Pit more than any other forum. Invalidating actual statistics because they don't agree with your side of the argument is a pretty shitty way to argue.

"Past results show X but if we change Y we might get different results" is, like, the entire foundation of the scientific method. But sure, whatever you say.

@tragedyjones said:

See, my issue with 1-3 edition is that it is NOT wireless. I can't get into a sci-fi game that has worse tech than my phone.

Yep. I miss playing Shadowrun, but I could never go back to 3rd ed.

@Seraphim73, @Thenomain - might be interested in this Why Seattle? thread.

Lots of good speculation, but perhaps the most relevant bit is at the end from a guy purporting to have heard it from FASA directly:

I was told that it was due to Settle having a wide variety of terrain available for different adventures as well as being a port city with a large international population.

My personal favorite response, though, is this one:

FASA was saving Chicago so they could nuke themselves.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Do you actually have any examples of an MSB-origin grudges moving to game?

Yes.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I think you're taking a small handful of your own friends who may not like posting here because of badness and then generalizing that to way more people than you have any justification to do.

Quite obviously I have not done an extensive poll of all MUSHers, but nor is it a "small handful" of people. I have heard this attitude expressed by lots of players through the years, re: WORA and MSB. There's an equal number who are all "What's MSB?" and I'm not comfortable inviting them.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

But we've seen how the more extreme rules of moderation that you and others specifically pushed for has had the actual effect of stifling it.

I have repeatedly supported a need for 1-star reviews as a PSA against toxic games (just in a different format than the current gangpile threads) and pushed back against the idea of having a "positive-only" ads thread. Don't blame me for the specific rules of engagement that I had no hand in crafting.

@Misadventure Mechanically it's not super hard. I think it's more the fact that it messes with peoples' expectations. If you say "SR3" there's a certain set of assumptions. If you say "Oh we're SR3 except for X..." then you open the door to folks being like: "But what about Y, or Z, which are kinda related to X but not expressly spelled out..."

Unrelated, I'm not quite sure why anyone would pick the SR3 mechanics with a SR4 setting, since the SR4 rules are so much more streamlined. But maybe that's just me.