Posts made by faraday

Hope everyone has a safe holiday.

CNN: Getting together for the holidays? This website will help you see how risky your plans are.

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

tho honestly until looking at this I've been like haha maybe I don't have adhd because I'm not hyper at all
but I do all of these.

Yeah, same. I never thought of myself as hyperactive, until I realized that all of these inward hyperactive behaviors still count.

@RightMeow said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I went back between wanting to cry, feeling called out, and being like OMG.. it's.. normal?!

I know right? It's like... OMG, so many things in my life suddenly make sense. I'm glad it helped. I love her channel. I've also found these sites to be super helpful: ADDitude and Totally ADD.

@RightMeow Here's a great video explaining it better than I could: Why Stimulant Medication Helps ADHD -- and How Stigma Can Hurt.

@insomniac7809 said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

ADHD meds are speed.

Not really. They are amphetamines, but calling ADHD meds "speed" is like calling coedine "heroin". Equating the two perpetuates an unfair and inaccurate stigma.

There are also various non-stimulant medicines now that work for some folks.

@silverfox My guess would be that you have your quotecolor preference set to "blue" instead of to an actual ansi code.

If you have an AresCentral handle, that color option will be in your AresCentral preferences. Otherwise you can set it with the quotecolor command on each individual game.

You can also have Ares colorize text between quotes in poses, to make quotations more visible. The color code can be found in the colors command. You can also combine colors, so %xb%xh will make it bold and blue.

quotecolor <ansi color code> - Sets your quotation color. Leave blank to clear it.

I love time travel stories, but how would you plan to manage the ripples and parallel universes from PC shenanigans on any scale? Everyone off in time doing their own things? Seems like it would rapidly devolve into an 'infinite worlds' type of setting where there are no real stakes because anything goes. (Which is not necessarily bad if that's the goal - but it's more comic book feel than scifi.)

@L-B-Heuschkel said in What do player-STs need?:

I need to not feel that anything I do may result in angry forum posts or retcons or otherwise having staff telling me I am not doing things the way they want. If this is the case, I very quickly stop doing things at all, because I'm not on a game to cause trouble. I will read the framework put to me before I do things, obviously -- but I have, once, been on a game where the message was 'go do all the things', and then every single time someone did, there were 'please don't do those things' from admin staff. That wilts an urge to be proactive fast.

There are good player STs out there, to be sure, and you definitely want to encourage those with positive feedback.

But unfortunately there are also a lot of folks out there who are only in it for selfish reasons (Get All The Things with minimal effort), aren't interested in following the theme, or can't plot their way out of a paper bag (I'm talking far beyond the typical Hollywood Plot Hole here). There's no way to legislate common sense in a policy, so sometimes it's inevitably going to result in corrective discussions, forum posts, or - in extreme instances - retcon. That's just part of running a game.

It's a hard balance to strike, maintaining continuity, theme and fairness without discouraging folks in the process. You can try to be positive and encouraging, but some folks are just going to take it hard no matter what you do.

@Wretched I was helping my daughter with a foreign language assignment that used the Brady Bunch to illustrate family words. I had the theme song stuck in my head for the whole rest of the night, despite the fact that I never really watched the show and haven't seen even a blip of it in decades.

And then I make seventeen trips to the kitchen to keep going back for the one thing I went in there for in the first place.

@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I know this one is mostly a wild 'theory' but its still one of my favorites. We are hunters.

Yeah I like it too. It's one of those things where I acknowledge there's zero scientific basis for it whatsoever, but it just makes so much sense.

@Arkandel said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

Us oldbies may even look at that new form and wrinkle our collective noses at it ("that ain't no MUSH! Get off my lawn!") but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

That's how I look at it. I think MUSHers tend to fixate on the hobby as being defined by the technology rather than the core concepts of the gameplay. MMOs of today don't look or play the same as the original Ultima Online, but we still consider them MMOs because there's a certain core that they share in common.

Though just as there are some people still playing old Nintendo NES games via emulators, there will probably always be people playing Penn/Tiny games via SimpleMU for as long as there exist computers capable of running them.

@il-volpe I understand. I was just trying to clarify how it could be done as a separate plugin, without needing to tie into FS3 at all -- which I think is what you ultimately want.

@bear_necessities said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

The hobby is not dying.

I think part of the problem is we all have a different definition of "dying".

What metric is being used? Total number of players playing any game? Total number of public games? Average number of players per game? Activity (measured in scenes/logs maybe) on different games? Average age of player?

Over what time period are we comparing? The past year? 3 years? 30 years?

There are probably a dozen different ways to potentially measure this, and we don't have solid historical numbers for most of them. All we have are subjective memories and opinions.

But let's talk about the numbers we do have. Bear in mind this is just for the Ares community.

Games

• 64 total games
• 14 games open to public, plus another 9 that were open/active but have since closed
• 5 games in public dev
• 18 private games (in dev or sandbox)
• 18 games closed without ever going public (probably never got off the ground)

Players

• 594 unique player handles

Scenes (for the top few most active games)

• Spirit Lake: 6900+ scenes in 2 years
• Gray Harbor: 6000+ scenes in a little under 2 years
• Savage Skies: 1700+ scenes in 1 year
• The Network: 1000+ scenes in 6 months

(*) Scenes counts total scenes started, some of which were certainly aborted midstream, but that's still a crap-ton of RP.

I mean... everyone's entitled to their own opinions and definitions, but that certainly doesn't seem like a dead hobby to me. ETA: Sure, it's no Fortnite or WoW with multiple millions of people, but do we really want to be?

All your points are valid, and you may well be right. That said...

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

In the end, I feel it's logical to assume that when THIS crowd and the MUDder crowd dont have a younger generation to pass the torch down to

I've heard anecdotal stories of younger folks new to MUSHing being drawn into Ares games. My kids have played on my test game on the web portal and dug it. Storium seems to have a younger playerbase than MUSHes, and Storium.Edu specifically recruits kids. I wouldn't count the younger generation out completely.

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.

You seem to be assuming that there's no way to make it easier to be a producer, or to make it easier to 'sell' someone on the hobby. I would argue that the development of new platforms like Ares and Evennia have the potential to change both of these foundational assumptions.

Will they? Only time will tell.

@Tat said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

It's not just 'earning' the pool, but limiting what happens when you don't have enough points in your pool (ie, what triggers that nosebleed).

As a generic "point tracker" system that's all done with manual effects, it could certainly be done as a separate plugin.

pools - Show your pools.
pool/award - Staff command to award pool points.
pool/spend - Player command to spend pool points.

That really has nothing whatsoever to do with FS3 though. A GM would have to manually apply modifiers or limit what abilities you could roll or whatever.

FS3 itself has no concept of point pools by design (apart from luck points) and as @Tat mentions, it would be impossible to build that in without some heavy custom modifications to the core code.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@Darren Except it literally didn't for us. I can only speak from personal experience. We got no traffic from there, ever.

Same. And I'm not just talking about recently - this has been my experience running games since the early 90's.

@Darren - your experience may well be different. I'm guessing it probably depends on the game. Something like Arx or Firan has more in common with RPI MUDs than something like a consent-based Western, and would likely get more recruits through MUDConnector. But for myself and the games I've been on? It's been a non-starter. Nevertheless, as LB and I said, nothing stops someone from still listing there.

@SixRegrets said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

If there was a site like MUD Connector for MUSHes, it'd help, but the current situation of those sites existing and having the next generation of MUSHes (Ares) not speak MSSP and etc in favor of the AresCentral directory is not helping anyone.

I would have to disagree there. The Ares and Evennia game directories absolutely help players find games. The Ares one makes registering as easy as ticking a box in your game configuration, meaning that virtually all Ares games are listed. (As opposed to something like MUDConnector where you have to go out of your way to submit an ad.) Evennia also makes it pretty easy to activate a game registration AFAIK.

Sure it would be nice if there were a centralized MUSHConnector, but someone would have to build that first. And if they did, I would desperately hope that they'd do so with a modern web-based API geared towards the information actually relevant to MUSH games, and not the ancient, MUD-oriented, telnet-based MSSP.

MUSHes historically don't get a lot of traffic from MUDConnector, because it's mostly used by MUD players, but you can still list a game there. Even an Ares one. Most games just don't bother.

It's tough to be casual-friendly (not having Stuff happen at such a breakneck pace that the casuals can't keep up) while at the same time providing enough Stuff to entertain the folks who are super-engaged and online every other night. Maybe impossible.

This is not a new or unique problem; video game companies face the same basic issue with casuals and die-hards.

It just gets a bit more complicated on MUs for a couple reasons. First, there's a critical mass of People Online required to sustain a game. Without access to on-demand RP, folks will wander off to do other things and the game quickly crumples. Also, MUs are largely relationship driven. (not just romance) It's hard when your character's friends are doing things daily and you can only touch base with them once every week or two.

You can browse AresMUSH games here: https://arescentral.aresmush.com/games

The stars give an indication of activity, and you can click on a game to see a more detailed breakdown of activity across different days/times. (Obviously activity alone isn't the sole or best measure of a game, but the OP specifically asked for active games.)

@Ganymede said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

If there’s a recent dip in activity, it is likely due to the stress ...

This. RP is down everywhere - even on other platforms, like Storium. I don't think that's a sign for this hobby in specific.

@RDC said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

There have been no drama free games. Not since the very inception of this hobby. Not at its height.

There are only games who deal with drama (mostly) well and games that don't.

Also this. Some games are drama tornados, but there's no drama-free game anywhere. Because humans.

@GreenFlashlight @Auspice Yeah I've forgotten things in the trunk. Repeatedly. I put things in the front passenger seat whenever possible.