Posts made by faraday

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I, personally, would love the ability for players to be able to add to the game, even if just rooms, or an object that alters the desc if they want.

Players can build in Ares (and I presume Evennia) if you give them permissions. I don't have a quota currently but it would be easy to add one. And there are ways to alter descs, though not with objects. Evennia even has a quasi-softcode system.

I don't think that the presence or absence of softcode is the defining quality of what makes a MU. More than a few folks have logged onto BSGU - particularly before the web portal took off - and didn't even realize it was a brand-new server and not PennMUSH.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I've seen lots of good from newer developments, but I'm also seeing this waltz back to hardcode that MUSH tried to get away from by giving admin all the softcode tools they need to make it what they want

That's more of a philosophical issue and folks will view things differently.

Yes, Ares and Evennia share some similarities with old MU hardcode.

BUT the languages are way easier to learn. The way you code is better. Instead of needing to monkey with stuff as people are playing you have the ability to develop changes locally and easily move them to the game via version control. These are common tools used by open-source hobbyist programmers around the world. Tutorials abound. And unlike MU hardcode, making changes doesn't require you to restart the game.

Also? Think about every game you've been on in the last 10 years. How often do they allow players to create substantial custom systems/objects? How often does anyone take advantage of that ability? How often does the code change appreciably after the beta period?

The new systems are different, sure. There's a learning curve, sure. But I am convinced that they make it easier to customize a game. Not harder.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

If its an update to MU in general, flexibility of the platform to include Admin ability to change how the system works should be taken into account, otherwise it feels like a step back to me to be honest. I don’t mean a change of globals like setting actors or finger notes, I mean the game system itself. FS3 is great and flexible, but in the end the dice pools aren’t much different than other systems. What if I want a system based on SAGA (cards), or WEG dice pools (your difficulty is not ‘per dice’ but the sum of the roll against 1 target number), or Amber/Fudge sans Fate Dice. How adaptable are the new systems to sweeping changes in mechanics? Or, like MUDs of old, are admin level utilizers locked to the game system that is being hard coded into these new systems?

This really doesn't strike me as a problem.

Evennia is pitched as just a building kit, so you can build whatever you want. I'd say it has the opposite problem, where you have to cobble together building blocks for even basic stuff like finger, bbs, jobs, etc.

Ares comes with more stuff built-in, but it's designed with a plugin system so you can add/remove things. Of course, if you start stripping things out, now you're getting into the realm of custom coding. You can take out FS3 pretty easily, but now you've got to code up something to replace it - and that's not trivial.

@ashen-shugar said in Alternative Formats to MU:

• First... rewrite the whole damn thing. From scratch.

That's what we did, though, with Ares and Evennia. Are they perfect? Of course not. But they’re new. Imagine them once they've had 30 years to evolve like the existing MU servers have.

Actually, no... if you guys are still using Ares in 30 years I think I'll cry.

So if you all want to see it happen, you all are going to have to help us with it.

Speaking just for myself, what I want isn't coding help it's player help. Like @Ganymede mentioned - she doesn’t use the BSGU web portal. That’s understandable (and she's certainly not the only one), but the only way these platforms are going to get better is by people using them, finding the glitches and pain points, and providing feedback.

And when providing feedback to devs, a little bit of patience and kindness goes a long way. It’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm for a project against a barrage of criticism. A bug is a bug, but it matters whether you report it as "Grr, this is broken again..." or "FYI I stumbled across this..."

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For me RP needs to be real time. Again, it doesn't mean this is the only 'valid' way to do it, but that's what would work for me.

I really do think it’s just a matter of establishing a social contract about how things are done on web-MUs. We already do that for telnet RP. Nothing about the technology says you can’t take 2 hours to pose. The people control that. The same can apply to web. You’re expected to pose every 10-15 minutes or excuse yourself. And the IC:RL time ratio can help force folks to resolve scenes in a timely fashion because otherwise it’ll be so stale it won’t matter.

The only thing the technology impacts is making sure it’s easy to receive notifications so people don’t routinely lose track of scenes the same way I forget about the Verizon guy I started a tech support chat with.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

But I think that's where some of the resistance to a web-based game comes from (I mean, there are also those people who just love SimpleMU, but I'm not so much dealing with them), and I felt like the argument for the experience a dedicated client provides was getting subsumed in that.

From a user perspective, I totally agree that's ideal.

BUT we're a hobbyist community. This is not a commercial product and we don't have the luxury of having a full dev team focused on supporting dedicated clients for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, etc. with their attendant versions and upgrades.

Also - having to support both telnet and web in the code at once makes the code way more complicated. This makes it harder for people to extend the platform with game-specific custom features.

So there are tradeoffs, and that's what has me pipe-dreaming about a web-only client.

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.

It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.

So if you do scene/start Mess Hall=public then it starts up a scene using the Mess Hall desc.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.

The main difference IMHO is that those apps are easy to use. A MUSH client just isn't. It's like a DOS shell.

I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.

@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.

@roz I think it’s both, but yes I agree with you.

@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.

Yet this pacing is the same thing that die hards love about MUs.

I believe there can be a middle ground between snails pace storium/PBF and traditional MUing. But most folks seem to see it as all or nothing.

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

the evidence is that people will in fact be perfectly happy using a web interface when a good one is available.

Some people use BSGU and Arx's web clients too. But I'm talking about a game that only has a web interface. If the majority of people logged into RfK via the web, I might believe that a web-only game was a viable thing. But I highly doubt that was the case given all the other evidence I've seen.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I feel like I'm saying that you can just do something because you want to and see what happens, and being told I'm wrong.

No, that wasn't what I meant. Of course you can do something just because you want to. I'm just saying that if countless polls and feedback say that people don't want something and you go and build it anyway, chances are good you're just wasting your time.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Not sure where you're getting this.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Make your system. See where it sticks. Reiterate. Sometimes you have to try something illogical before seeing where the limits of too-much and too-little are. I don't even think that the concept is bad, but it's not for some people.

^^^ That's where I'm getting that. Sometimes, no, you don't have to try something illogical to see where it will work. Sometimes user research tells you something is a bad idea. That's the whole point of the field of user research.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

We are an infamously bad polling source; three people out of...how many people on Soapbox?...say that they wouldn't like it.

I'm not talking about three people. I'm referring to the feedback I've gotten from players on several games, the poll I did here, comments on the Ares forum, the prevalent vocal hatred of games with wikis across many threads here, and reactions to Ares' web stuff.

Seriously. I've done my research. It's not just a handful of dinosaurs saying "I don't like this because it's new", it's a prevailing sentiment. It's all well and good to say "If you build it they will come", but the reality is that we're a community where many people boycott games because of the channel commands. Radically changing the way the game is played - without popular support - is courting disaster IMHO.

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

There's no actual reason why a web-based RP game couldn't have the same pacing as a telnet-based one.

I've made that argument many times before, but the counter-argument is always "but people will view it more like play-by-forum and pose differently". Which may or may no be true, but I still think that's a people problem not a technology problem.

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

If I had to wait hours between poses I'd fuck right the hell off because that's literally two poses before I have to go to work.

Everyone has different things they want out of RP. What sucks for one person is literally the only way someone else would get any RP at all. All the posts here are just kinda illustrating my point about "the majority of MUSHers vehemently don't want something like this".

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

See, I think it'd cause more BarRP, not less. And likely less if not cancel out combat altogether. Who wants to engage in combat when it might be days before you get an answer to a question from your ST before you can take your action?

If the expectation is that a scene will be completed in 1-3 days, then a storyteller taking 2 days to respond to a question is breaking the social contract, just like a storyteller in the current MUSH form who took 2 hours to respond in the middle of a combat scene. Not every request would need to be answered immediately, but urgent ones about a scene in progress? That should get priority.

I mean, come on - how many times a day do people check their email, or facebook, or heck - this forum? This is not a revolutionary idea. Lots of people are on from work. They can't devote their entire attention to a traditional MUSH scene, but I'm willing to bet that a fair number of them could handle tossing out a pose an hour when they had a free moment. Add that up over a day or three, and you've got yourself a scene where previously there would've been none.

@miss-demeanor said in Alternative Formats to MU:

See, and I don't really see a difference between having 3-4 tabs or windows up and having 3-4 (or more) spawn windows up in the client itself.

Yep ditto.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And in reading these ideas, I feel like I'm being asked to go back to that, just with some shiny new toys slapped on top.

I tried Storium and I hated it because the pace was excruciatingly slow. But my opinion is that's a culture issue, not a technology issue.

Just look at this thread here. How many posts have there been in 1 day? We have lively back-and-forth conversations all the time. I see the same thing with discord and slack conversations. It's not the app that controls the conversation, it's the people.

IMHO you could translate that to a MUSH environment by just expecting that scenes would be resolved in 1-3 days.

To me, the key to that is maintaining the MUs IC:RL time ratio. RP rooms and temproom scenes already enable you to have a scene spanning 2 weeks, but it sucks because by the time you finish it - events have already moved on. The time ratio keeps the pressure on to resolve things in a timely fashion, and that would be just as true on a web-based game.

And yeah, scenes taking 3 days instead of 1 evening would change some things. There will probably be a decrease in BarRP, but I'm okay with that. Combat scenes might be more summarized in 2-3 rounds instead of 10, but I'm okay with that too.

I think that having fewer yet more focused scenes is not a bad thing, especially when coupled with the increased flexibility that you no longer have to set aside a block of 4 hours to RP, you no longer have to turn up for event scenes at a pre-arranged time, and you no longer have to stay up to 2am to RP with your friends in another timezone. So yes, I think that in the end this will enable better stories.

But, as stated, I recognize that I'm in the minority here. Which is why Ares is still played primarily via telnet, even if it offends my sense of progress and innovation.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Fast-forward three hours, 'Hurr. Sorry guys, I lost track of the tab because I was doing other stuff. Sorry.'

Sure, but those are solved problems in every other medium but MUSHing. PBP forums? Play-By-Gdoc? Storium? They don't expect you to sit there twiddling your thumbs between poses. You pose, and then it's perfectly fine to come back three hours later. That's just how it is. Web chats? They make dedicated desktop/mobile apps using the same underlying api - though of course that takes a lot of effort.

Now I get that many people like the "immediacy" of MUSHing, which is what I was saying about why the majority won't switch to a web-based medium. I'm just saying there's a cost to that.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I just wish built-in web clients supported some sort of logging

Sorry for double post but I missed this the first time. You're assuming a traditional model of "stateless junk window with everything from channels to mails to help to scene stuff shoved into it". That model is what necessitates logging.

You don't need to "log" when people generate RP in a google doc. Or on a PBP web forum or storium. You may want to export the RP as a backup; that's different. A different way of playing the game that's similar to those other forums (such as my Pipedream Web Prototype) could get us there.

And yes, @Apos, we may be able to draw in more new people from other mediums than we'd lose. But for me? I'd rather play with the friends I've made over the past 20 years. And the overwhelming majority of them don't want to leave the MU client for various understandable reasons.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For many people, studies are finding that multitasking is actually a bad thing. And how many of us already gripe on the regular about our RP partners taking 20, 30 minutes to pose?

I think that expecting people to stay focused on the game is unrealistic given that the nature of the medium means you have to wait for other people to pose. Even if there are only two people, it's going to take 10 minutes on average for someone to come up with a halfway decent pose. Add another person in? No. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to stand there twiddling my thumbs staring at a screen for 15-20 minutes. Multitasking is inevitable due to the genre.

But I agree with your basic principle, which is that spreading the game across two mediums is ugly. The difference is that I think the web is the medium we should be moving towards. There is nothing you can do in-game that can't be done on the web. There are many, many, many things you can't do in-game that you can do on the web. If we have to stick to only one platform, web is a no-brainer IMHO.

@surreality said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@shelbeast I think that's more or less what @faraday is doing with Ares. I think.

Not exactly, but that's mostly because the overwhelming majority of MUSHers have indicated that they'd abjectly refuse to play on a game that was entirely web-based. Heck, a non-trivial number of them refuse to play on a game with a mandatory web presence at all.

Ares has tons of stuff available on the web - chargen, bbs, events, mail, combat, help, character profiles, logged and auto-cleaned scenes, admin jobs and config, and more. But the game is still principally played in a MU client. Not because it needs to be for any technical reason, but because I actually want people to play it.