Posts made by faraday

Just once I would like to be able to make a grilled cheese sandwich on the first try.

Inevitably it takes forever to heat up, so I get bored and distracted, and then ZOMG EXPONENTIAL HEAT RISE = charred bread. Sigh.

@boneghazi For me I think it's some kind of perverse optimism. Like... I want to like it, so I keep hoping it will get better? I still watch it, kinda halfheartedly.

@boneghazi said in Good TV:

I tried, in earnest, to watch Outlander. In fact, I got to Season 2, Episode 5 before I had to officially call it quits.

Outlander is one of those shows that I wanted so badly to like. I was so excited when it first came out. It ticked off so many "right up my alley" boxes - time travel, WW2, highlanders, medicine, female leads. And yet... meh.

@wretched And then people don't understand why you don't know off the top of your head how old you are.

Everyone is clearly entitled to feel how they feel about logins. Some folks get discouraged by a small WHO list, whether or not people are RPing. Some folks get discouraged by a big WHO list where everybody is idling. There is nothing objectively wrong with either position.

What is uncool is folks saying: "Hey, you know that thing you find fun on these games? Hanging out and talking to your friends? You need to stop doing that so I can feel better about my potential to find entertainment."

The core question should be: is there RP available?

If there is, then focus on that (go play!) and don't worry about what the other people are doing with their time. If there isn't, also focus on that (try to generate some RP!) and don't worry about what the other people are doing with their time!

People will RP when:

1. They are available to play.
2. There is something interesting enough to motivate them to play.

While you can certainly target your RP requests to peak activity times, #1 is largely out of your control. If someone isn't available to play, badgering or guilting them about it doesn't increase activity because they were never going to RP anyway. All it does is make them less engaged with the game as a whole, which ultimately leads to less RP overall.

If you care about getting people engaged, focus on #2. Give them something that's actually more interesting to do than just sitting around chatting with their friends.

@derp said in Idling all day on MU*s:

I think that I would personally challenge the premise that this is some kind of problem.

This. A MUSH is more than just a game, it's a community -- at least to many people.

So folks like to hang out and chat even when they can't necessarily go out to play.

I don't see any harm in it. If your game isn't getting any RP, there are probably larger issues going on. Trying to discourage people from hanging out and chatting isn't going to make them play - it's just going to make them not log in. I don't see how that helps anybody.

@three-eyed-crow said in Criticism: X-Men Divergence:

It's kinda shocking how much a one-sentence 'application' mitigates this

Oh, sure, I'm not at all against requiring apps for rosters. I was just pointing out that it's a system option. You can require apps for a single character, all characters, or none of them.

But if you ARE going to require apps, then you need a way to talk to the person applying. That means either getting their email or letting them make up a player bit. Either way, it requires communication on the part of staff to let the player know what's up. No amount of code can substitute for that

@tat said in Criticism: X-Men Divergence:

There's not a smooth way in Ares to require an application for a roster character without the email step.

As @Lotherio pointed out, the optimum Ares workflow is that you can create a character, submit the roster app from there, and staff can contact you that way. The email is just a fallback because if you don't have a character in-game there's no other way for them to contact you to give you the character info.

I'm not sure why the game has disallowed character creation. Even if you don't want to allow OCs in chargen, there's still value in having OOC character bits (Ares calls them "player bits"). But regardless, that's a game choice. So is requiring apps at all; Ares has a simple roster/claim that immediately lets you take a character and play. Some games just prefer to have an application process.

It's true that the roster app job comes from System not from the actual character who you're submitting from. It was just easier that way since you might be apping from a guest or anonymously from the web. I could tweak that a bit, but it wouldn't help in this case since you don't have a character to check in with.

@testament said in Good TV:

But he brought over his all metal(this is a big deal to me, because the plastic shit just wasn't as good) lion Voltron for me to play with. And boy did I play with it, though it was always hard to give back when he had to leave.

I had the metal Voltron as a kid, and man - that was one of the best toys ever. I'm sad I got rid of it.

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

So when people say that things are "back to normal", I honestly don't know what the fuck they're talking about. What is the phrase for feeling like you're being gaslit by 300 million people?

Same.

@greenflashlight That's relatable.

@Wretched Right? ADHD treatment is so not ADHD friendly.

My ADHD pet peeve of the week/month/year is people who don't get back to you. Like I get that everyone's busy, but man. Now you're making triple the work for me because I have to put in elaborate systems to remember to check in with you to follow up on the simple request I sent. And that's not easy.

@arkandel said in Returning to MU*ing, looking for recommendations:

WoD used to not work well for Ares due to its internal combat system limitations?
Has this been addressed or are folks using workarounds?

You can turn off FS3 skills and combat with a checkbox. Ares allows you to plug in your own custom chargen/sheet/roll systems. There's an off-the-shelf plugin that lets you use plaintext or PDF sheets with a simple die roller, which is what most of the Ares WoD/CoD games are using.

The main obstacle is that developing the code for automating a system like WoD is a metric ton of work, no matter what codebase you use. Theno has already put that work in on the older platforms, but nobody's done it for Ares. There are some other potential obstacles depending on how much immersive code you want, but we have a separate thread for that.

@ortallus Everyone’s different. We have a running poll at work and it ranges from “my arm was sore” to “I felt like I had the flu and didn’t want to get out of bed for a day.” Of course it’s all still better than getting covid itself.

I’d get some pizza just to cover all the bases.

@misadventure said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

I think the main barrier is that most players don't want an environment that can change significantly

While I get that some folks would rather have more mutable settings, I don't think of it as a "barrier" in a negative sense, but rather a guardrail.

MUSHes are more like TV shows than most other forms of media. They're designed for longevity. For the good ones, careful attention needs to be paid to the elements of the setting that provide the fuel for the stories. Messing with those core underpinnings can blow up the entire show.

You don't often see TV shows make massive changes to their settings, and for good reason. Of course, when they do - it can be epic, but it's just so disruptive to storylines, sets, etc. that it has to be done carefully and deliberately. Not just because Bob the writer (or player, in the MU analogy) felt like doing something different on a boring Saturday.

@groth said in Good TV:

In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?

Not at all. I liked Connor Mason's character very much in Timeless as the eccentric billionaire inventor.

But I think it gets murkier when you have established properties. People come at it with expectations about the characters. There's more to Tony Stark than just "billionaire playboy". He has a backstory, which comes with a certain set of baggage.

For example, I didn't like it when RDM's Battlestar gender-swapped Starbuck. Not because I have anything against inclusion (on the contrary, I think it's vital), but because I had this "Dirk Benedict" image of this character etched in my head and it created a weird cognitive dissonance. I would much rather them have reimagined Sheba or Athena, or promoted a new character.

I get that it's different in comics, since there are already so many variants of characters. And that there's some marketing value in making a "female 007" versus a new and original spy character. At the end of the day, I applaud having more diversity. I just sometimes wonder if there's maybe a better way to get there.

@ominous said in RL Anger:

Can confirm that it's a thing and it's mostly drug related.

I don't think there's much debate in scientific circles about whether it's "a thing" - the debate is whether it's a separate thing deserving of its own name ("excited delirium") vs. something that is already covered by the symptoms of other conditions (drug use, psychosis, etc.) That is a question for the researchers, and why it's not in the DSM.

None of that even remotely excuses those bully cops falsely trying to use it as a shield for their abuses. It's appalling how often it happens. (ETA: Not referring to your story there, just to be clear.)

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

It's the inter-personal relationships I enjoy the most as a player -- and yes, I realise what that sounds like, but I'm not talking about TS. I like getting to know other characters, to form bonds and connect.

Totally. If you throw a bunch of people who don't know each other at all into an adventure, it can sometimes work out, but often it's just a bunch of awkward. It's much more interesting when there are connections between the characters, and you only get that through the in-between RP.

@mietze said in Battling FOMO (any game):

Which means that I'm not sure you can really truly eliminate that through policies.

You can never eliminate fear. And as Gany points out, you can never eliminate the inevitability of missing out on some percentage of Things.

You can only do your best to ensure that people have a chance of being involved, so they are not actually missing out on everything.