Posts made by faraday

@tinuviel said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

The rule encourages people to 'dogpile' demanding people obey the rule - much akin to the incredibly loud child insisting "SHHHHH" over quiet conversation.

The moderators have previously asked people to chime in when they think someone is stepping over the line.

Either there are rules and the community is expected to apply peer pressure when people step outside the rules, or there aren't. It can't be both ways.

I don't understand why we can't just lock the ad threads once they're posted. Preferably to the owner so they can update it as needed, but even making them post a new thread each time would be better than this constant bickering we've had for the past year. Either way, having a policy that isn't even slightly enforced is just invitation to ignore other policies too.

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

3. The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

You're assuming XP can be the only carrot, though, and that's not so. In FS3 games for instance, XP is handed out fairly and automatically to everyone as a way of modeling IC progression and preventing the dino effect, or making players more powerful than one another simply by virtue of their OOC ability to contribute to the game. Luck points are the carrot.

I'm not saying this is the only or even the best way to do it for every game. I'm just saying that players fixating on XP as the only thing that matters isn't necessarily healthy for the game either.

@kanye-qwest said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I don't have data on this, obviously, but if people are idling on grid and someone wanders up and poses at them, it seems like a 50/50 they might say screw it and pose back and get into an rp scene.

Obviously I have no hard data either, but my anecdotal experience was that it was more like 10/90. Sure it happened, but it was rare. Far more common was people ignoring you, hiding away in private places, as @farfalla said, or just not logging in at all (and thus missing out on potential community aspects).

I do agree with @Ganymede that the rise of OOC rooms and the rise of "appointment RP" were correlated, but correlation does not imply causation. For me the causation was the other way around. With more and more people doing "appointment RP", they looked for something to do while they were waiting for their appointment. Enter the OOC Room as a convenient outlet. Around that same time, many games also started reducing or even eliminating private residences, forcing people to idle elsewhere.

The benefits of channels over OOC Room are many, IMHO: You can segregate the chatter by subject so it isn't one giant free-for-all, people can tune in and out at will, you can chatter while RPing, (on Ares) you can chat from the web portal, there's a convenient history (which is good for curtailing abuse and catching up) and it's easier for staff to monitor. The down side, of course, is that channels require more work to talk on.

So I don't want to sound like I'm pro-OOC room, by any stretch. I just don't think removing them will drive RP.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Maybe I'm wrong. But if I am wrong and people listen to me anyway and get rid of chatty OOC rooms, the worst that will have happened is that games will have gotten rid of what is often a troubled part of many games.

I first created an OOC lounge on one of my games some 20-odd years ago after noticing a trend of people idling on the grid when they weren't available for RP but still wanted to be online to chat/do jobs/check mail/whatever. You'd see people IC, get all excited, go to join them, only to be met with crickets chirping (because they were AFK) or "Oh sorry, I'm not really here" when you tried to engage them with RP. That stuff was far more annoying to me than having folks in the lounge. But obviously YMMV.

I'm not actually opposed to muting the OOC room and forcing people to chat on channels. It's something I've considered anyway for Ares for other reasons (channel abuse tools, engaging people on the web portal, etc.). But I have zero expectation that it will encourage people to RP more. People will RP or they won't. Having the ability to chat while they can't builds community, but it doesn't keep people from RPing.

@lisse24 I've been on plenty of games where - yes, people hang in the OOC lounge while not available for RP or waiting for something, but as soon as something they are interested in comes along they hop IC immediately and go play. The key is that interest, not the room. We can agree to disagree; I don't pretend that one solution fits all games. I'm just saying that my experience does not match yours, so I see a different root cause of the problem.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

OOC Rooms, while popular, incentivize sitting OOC, by making social interaction available while doing so.

I think you're mistaking the chicken for the egg here.

The very nature of the MUSH interface means that character bits always need to be present in "a room". If you force people to be IC or log off, you'll just see people idling in private rooms while chatting on channels, or being on the grid but "not really here". This has been the case for 30 years.

OOC Rooms aren't the problem. The "problem" is the trend of players with limited free time choosing to wait around for "something good" or "something specific" as opposed to just going IC and taking the first random scene with strangers that comes along. And I use air quotes deliberately there because I'm not personally convinced that's a bad thing.

@arkandel The trailer for BF5 looked utterly absurd for a "WWII" game, and the presence of female soldiers (which, btw. did exist in WWII in specific circumstances) was the least of its problems. I wasn't impressed with the changes they made to Battlefront2 (which apparently is the same engine) so I can understand why it bombed.

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.

@zombiegenesis said in Back in my day....:

The problem with this generation is that there is social media to make sure EVERY kid is aware of the latest dumb fuck thing to try.

Yeah I think it's just getting more attention because now the kids are doing the SAME dumb thing instead of each coming up with dumb things on their own. But kids have always done dumb, sometimes dangerous things.

In the grand scheme of things some doofuses eating soap is maybe not so bad compared to an entire generation doing crazy stunts without bike helmets.

@arkandel said in Ideal Scene Length?:

I think I like meet and greets especially if they are organic and players invest in them.

Meet&greets are important for building out your character's relationship circle, but here's one case where I think shorter is better. Because if people feel the need to keep the scene going until midnight, you either run out of things to talk about, or you get this decidedly inorganic thing where now you're over-sharing all kinds of crap about your character. Nobody(*) does that.

There's this stigma in MUSHing that once you enter a scene you're committed until you have some kind of RL excuse to stop playing. Otherwise it's taken as some kind of personal rejection. I think our scenes would be better if we would just let them end when it makes sense.

(*) Actually people do, and my mom seems to be a magnet for them, but that's a separate issue.

@jeshin @scissors The suggested hosting for Ares is $5/month with a few months free if you use the referral code. Of course Ares is still in beta but it’s geting more solid every week. https://aresmush.com/tutorials/install

@skew said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

I've helped a few people set up games. I've offered up my help to more. I've yet to see any of those games go live, and it's def not because the code isn't there. I've even recently given someone an entirely set up and functional game, but they want to go another direction. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, likewise. With my old Penn code suite and now even moreso with Ares, you can get a game set up and fully coded with standard systems in a few hours. Volund and Theno and skew and others have all helped set up games.

Now, sure, if you want some Arx-like economy/clue/etc. or Spirit Lake magic system, that's gonna take some custom code work. But that's a choice (a completely valid and understandable choice, but nevertheless a choice). You can get a game going without a coder.

HorrorMUX, Lovecraft, Stranger Things...there have been several "urban fantasy/modern horror" games open in the past year or so, and none of them took off like this. I think that's a testament to this staff hitting on an unmet need. Good for them.

Folks want to think they should have anticipated the popularity and planned differently? Fine. But filling up an ad thread with pages of negativity because a game was so interesting and popular it "sold out"? That just strikes me as shooting yourselves in the foot, honestly. We want more games? We need to encourage creators, not discourage them.

@faraday said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

But giving staff grief for making a tough call to try to make a quality game? That's not cool.

Making a complaint based on a decision is not 'giving staff grief.'

Umm... it kinda is? Especially when said complaint gets dragged across several pages of posts. And especially when it's in direct contradiction of the "Rules of Engagement" for the Ads section.

This is not the place to criticise or attack either those games or their runners.

@too-old-for-this said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

Why wouldn't anyone expect a flood of interest in something new and different?

History? Look at the Advertisements board for other games that have opened in the past year or so. They weren't exactly flooded with apps. And a lot of games in the last, say, five years or so have been quite modest in size.

Does anyone really expect their video to be the one that goes viral?

@tinuviel said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

Apparently not! Apparently restrictions were the idea all along, if @Noodle-McDoodle is to be believed.

I think that's assuming an awful lot of ill will based on a random comment from one person who isn't even on staff.

There's absolutely no indication that there was some unadvertised population cap, and every indication that it's just a case of staff dramatically underestimating how popular the game would be.

"oh this is going to be pretty niche, let's advertise so it's not a ghost town"
"ZOMG ALL THE PEOPLE CAME"

Disappointment is perfectly understandable. I was bummed I didn't get tickets to a show recently because I didn't find out about it in time. It happens.

But giving staff grief for making a tough call to try to make a quality game? That's not cool. That's the sort of attitude that makes people reluctant to run games in the first place.

@arkandel said in Looking for...:

universally editable but easily reversible.

Yes, and they're predicated on the idea that there are moderators/editors doing said reversals. Anyway - as you say, it's up to whoever volunteers.

@paris said in Looking for...:

pages should only be editable by their creators, or people they select

That's well and good until someone decides to troll Harvey by creating a wiki page for Harvey.

The only solution for this is strict moderation, which is a very not-MSB stance. I really don't see how this is going to work.

@sab oh I thought we were just talking about using hashtags in game posts or whatnot. Never mind.