Best posts made by faraday

@runescryer Yeah that's been a standard part of my RP room code for a decade. I'm sure others have their versions too. I haven't seen people use it that much though.

@coin said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

Right. But part of the investment is at chargen. If it is very easy to make a new character, a lot of people (not everyone, certainly not most, but not an insignificant number) will just not give a shit.

Yes, but that's still a player issue not a system issue. I don't think "make chargen a PITA so people won't want to risk their characters senselessly" is really a good solution to the problem.

@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

If he's just something that you created and have been running for 2 years off and on, he is your NPC. I'm going to make my own bartender to avoid stepping on your toes.

Maybe that's a game culture issue? And maybe that's part of the disconnect. On the games I've been on, there's no such stigma attached. Lots of people use the community bartender. There's a tacit assumption that you won't kill him off or anything without talking to the person who created him, but otherwise you're free to use him - no code involved in "taking him off the shelf" or anything.

@botulism said in Short-Term MU*s:

@faraday Hmm. True. I guess if I kept it tightly focused like that it could work. They'd lack the allies/enemies and goals being built-in, but get more freedom.

You could always offer both. Creating a whole 'stable' of pre-built chars every time the theme changes sounds like a ton of work though.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

I'm going to be lazy. Just imagine a facepalm GIF here.
These aren't video games or movies.

You an imagine an eyeroll GIF here then, because duh. It was an analogy. I think there are general truths to product advertising regardless of the product. And MUSHes are a product.

MUSHes are reliant on the players being excited to help BUILD the game, create stories, etc.

And for that precise reason it's kinda helpful to know whether anyone is interested in helping to build a game, create the stories, etc. before you devote six months of your life to building the thing. I still think doing polls of strangers on an antagonistic forum is maybe not the greatest way to do said research, but I'm not going to fault someone for trying.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

Can you name any, besides <insert generic multisphere WoD>?

Can you name many MUs that were "very successful" period? Do you have any evidence beyond your personal opinion that some majority of people who say "Ooh yeah I'd play the heck out of that MUSH!" in February are all: "Meh, whatever" by the time October rolls around?

I needed a name for my first staff alt on B5 MUSH. I'd just done a college book report on scientist Michael Faraday. He was a pretty cool inventor guy who preferred practical experiments over theory, so it seemed fitting for a coder. I'd intended it to be temporary until I thought of something better, but I never did.

@magee101 That's fine. Everybody's different.

I don't play MMOs because I utterly despise the forced mechanical progression of having to start at level 1 and grind rats or chickens or whatever dumb thing just to get a moderately competent character. And forget about ever trying to catch up to my friends, who have been playing longer. Even with the bonus rested XP or whatever, it's the Dino Effect on a massive scale. I hate it.

I play Minecraft with my kids, but I don't particularly enjoy it because building/creating feels utterly pointless to me.

That doesn't mean either is bad though, as millions of players who do play those games illustrate. It just means people look for different things in their games.

@sunny said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

if they don't allow them, people will just play on another game.

That's not a universal truth, particularly if the game in question is a 'niche' game with something special about it or the only one in its genre. That said, I agree that 'limiting multitasking' is a pretty thin reason for restricting alts, since they could always find something else to fill their time somewhere - whether it's another MU or watching TV in-between poses. Multi-taskers gonna multi-task.

I confess I don't really play on comic games, but I've never understood the whole letting people play multiple FCs thing. I've never seen that work on any other kind of game genre. Heck, most games have trouble getting people to maintain even one FC, let alone multiples.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

However to truly catch up on the power curve all that matters is gear. To avoid the dino effect you mention WoW has periodic catching up events - basically when they have a big patch every few months to introduce fresh, harder content they also open a new quest nexus or vendors who hand out cheap gear just high enough to handle that content enough to farm better stuff.

In theory maybe. In practice, when I played, I was perpetually behind everyone else because they were hard-core and I was casual. The gear and/or level differential effectively made it impossible to play with my friends (at least - unless I wanted to be always dying in the first five minutes), and then it was like: what's the point? If I want to do something solo I'll go play playstation.

I don't bring this up to harp on MMOs, because that's not really what we're talking about here. My point is just that advancement/earning systems all have the same potential pitfalls: the Dino Effect, OOC jealousy, alienating casual or disconnected players (as some were talking about on the other gamification thread), and other unintended consequences. I'm not saying any game is wrong for using these things. Like @Apos said, everybody has to make their own value judgements as to the pros-cons, and clearly there are players who just won't play without some sort of carrot. I've just made the decision that the cons dramatically outweigh the pros from my perspective.

@ganymede said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

@faraday said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

Staff letting their friends/siblings/spouses camp characters they never intend to play is not only poor planning, but is going to open them up to cries of staff favoritism to friends.

And yet it happens all the time: the favoritism, and the crying, regardless of whether there is any conscious favoritism.

Sure, but I think the favoritism card gets overplayed. If you’re giving a coveted role to a player you know is awesome and who has a proven track record of being reliable and not crazy and just happens to be your friend then that’s not really favoritism in my book... that’s using common sense and making a decision that’s likely to benefit the game as a whole.

Now if you give that same covered role to a friend who you know is going to just camp it, TS with Batman all day, or flake out like they have on every other game... then you’re not only playing favorites, you’re a fool.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

It's where the allegations of 'earning it' usually come in. Do you (as staff) want a non-ideal but already IC positioned person who has taken some steps in taking up a role, or someone who hasn't done anything for it yet but who you expect will be a better fit?

Personally? I, as staff, want neither. It's basically a lose-lose proposition so I just don't do that any more. Leadership positions are all staff-run NPCs. This has pros and cons. Like I said - it's all a game of tradeoffs.

For the purposes of your thought experiment, if you're going the IC route, I think you have to look at what's best for the story. Even if there's no clear frontrunner, there has to be some way of deciding between the candidates. If you're going the OOC route, then sure - bring in whoever you feel "earned it" by whatever metric you're using. Just be prepared to deal with a lot of disgruntled players.

I think the lists driven by the games themselves (like AresCentral Game Directory and the Evennia Game Index are a better way to go than a manually-maintained wiki. The problem we see with places like MudConnector is that nobody can be bothered to register their games there or update them as things change/close/etc.

If somebody could make something like that for Rhost/Penn, or even just work together to make a central directory, that would be ideal IMHO.

@surreality I don't think anybody's saying that it's bad to make a brief mention that players should feel free to contact staff if somebody's being a creeper. Your initial post with five bullet points about what people need to know about contacting staff sounded a LOT more involved than that, which is what I think @Thenomain was responding to. You've openly stated your preference for verbosity in policy files on several threads before, so I don't think anyone's horribly off base or meaning offense in thinking that's what you meant here. At any rate, I think we're veering a bit far off of the original thread into policy discussion.

@ganymede said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

@ixokai said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

You want staff to start approving characters based on RP schedules?!

For a comic book game? Yes.

I'd think that would be true for any character in a RP-leader position. It's not really about "how many hours can you put in" but "are you going to be available to drive RP".

(Of course - I'm no longer a fan of having PCs in enforced RP-leader positions for this and other reasons, but I understand I'm in a minority there.)

@auspice Funny, I would actually find the personal ones even more invasive and annoying because they're butting into my sense of agency over how my character feels and thinks. Everyone's got their own pet peeves. But yeah, the log editing is definitely a major pain. I remember having to strip weather emits out of logs constantly on older games.

@arkandel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but it's hard to tell if having complaints both about silencing people by catering to SJWs and - at the same time - not moderating enough to push contentious behavior out is a sign we're doing something very wrong or very right.

Also not being sarcastic, but I think that's the reality any time you do moderation. You'll inevitably get complaints from both sides. Nobody likes being silenced, so they're gonna complain. And unless the board is 100% in alignment of what should be silenced, some of them are going to complain the other way.

The real question is not who complains more, but whether the net result is giving you the kind of forum you want to have. (Or, if you leave it to democracy - what the majority of members, not necessarily the majority of complainers, wish to have).

@thenomain said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

Until someone else starts reacting to it, then it becomes annoying again. It's why the "just gag someone" answer to an annoying person often doesn't work in a group discussion like, e.g., a web forum.

Yes. How many times have we all seen something like this?

Bob and Mary are RPing a scene.
Joe joins, looks at the weather/time in the room and poses in: "Joe comes in, shaking out his umbrella. 'What are you guys doing here so late?'"
Bob says OOC: Uh, actually we're RPing that it's a sunny afternoon.

Like... I'm not at all opposed to an opt-in "plot suggestion" system that will toss you random hooks/emits that you can choose to incorporate into your pose if it makes sense to the scene and is something you'd like to incorporate into the story.

But just tossing out randomized emits that may not make sense in context of the scene, may not be seen consistently by everyone, and may not be acknowledged by everyone just seems... doomed.

@surreality said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

It doesn't even have to be a hot button issue.

Well I think the whole question about how much money to be spent on social services is a hot-button issue for a lot of people. But I agree with you that the comment you're referring to in this thread (and a couple others like it) is exactly the sort of hostile, dismissive thing I'm saying is a problem.

@lotherio said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

Just that the coming to a room and posing in without some pretext is more the issue than ambiance/weather/day/night code with the example.

Yes, I agree - I was just using it to illustrate what I see as the inherent confusion of having it in the room desc. If somebody wants a suggestion as to the weather for the scene when starting one, there are any number of ways to get that. But having it there as "here's what the game says the weather is" causes coordination issues.

@lithium said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

It shouldn't be that difficult.

Codewise it isn't, but what do you think about the confusion issue of Bob (who saw the emit) reacting to it while Jane (who opted out) has a completely different expectation?

@friendlybee - I already do stay out of the hog pit, but thank you for the suggestion. And the moderators are already well aware of the types of threads I'm referring to, since they're the ones moving them to the hog pit. I really see no value in hunting them down so people can debate each one individually. If you haven't seen it? Great. But it definitely exists.