@derp said in Shows and Movies We're Looking Forward To:
I'll go ahead and start this thread with: Willow
I was totally going to post about this too. So excited. One of my favorite movies. My brother and I would quote it constantly.
@derp said in Shows and Movies We're Looking Forward To:
I'll go ahead and start this thread with: Willow
I was totally going to post about this too. So excited. One of my favorite movies. My brother and I would quote it constantly.
@derp said in Places Code Pros and Cons:
I was more thinking like the MUX logger object things that just capture the poses in the room in sequentially numbered attributes and then spits out a formatted log at the end.
Right, that's what I meant by "server-side auto logger." It could be baked into the server hardcode (as in Ares), but it could also be softcode on the other systems. It's just that some (many? most? I don't even know any more) games don't have that, so it's an academic exercise at best.
@derp said in Places Code Pros and Cons:
I bet there's a way to make it happen. Coders are smart.
I mean, we may be smart but we can't do much with data that isn't there. A client log is only as complete as the messages that come to the client. If you're filtering out places talk on the server side and never sending it to the clients, client-side logs can never be complete. You would need some kind of server-side auto-logger. Ares has that, obviously, but many other servers don't as a matter of course.
Even with Ares, so many of the scene commands are tied into the scene and not your version of the scene that it would require a huge rearchitecting to try to do per-player filtering. Especially given the alt/GM factors. I just don't see places code being used enough to make it worth the effort, honestly.
@Misadventure asked over in Too Much:
Do you happen to have or recall a list of the pros and cons for the setups (for places code) you looked at?
There was actually a big discussion about this a few years back in this other thread, but I'll summarize where I ended up.
TL;DR; - no system is perfect. The main variable is what you think is the main purpose for a places system. For me it's organizational - where is everyone? The spam reduction aspects always caused more hassle than help for me. YMMV. If you see "reducing spam" as the main goal, you might go in a completely different direction.
This is mostly a data dump, but everyone feel free to share other thoughts and other places code alternatives you've seen.
Traditional Pros/Cons
In old-school systems, a player joins a place and uses a special command (usually tt
) that emits only to people at that place.
Ares Pros/Cons
In Ares, you pose as normal and everyone can see your pose. There's just an informational tag around it, like:
[+ At Table in the Corner +] Faraday falls off her chair.
Hybrid Pros/Cons
I also considered a hybrid system where it would use normal pose commands, but still only emit to people at the place.
Miscellaneous Considerations
As someone mentioned in the other thread, in traditional/hybrid, you could conceivably allow GMs to join multiple places to monitor things. That just causes some added complexity and potentially confusion (where is their PC really?)
In Ares' web portal, the scene pose output isn't customized per character, and you could conceivably have multiple characters in the same scene browser. This makes filtering output very challenging.
The only suggestion I could give for "places" is something similar. If you are at a place, then rather than using a code like 'tt', your default pose, emit, or ooc command would only be seen by folks in the same place;
I don't know if any of this is feasible.
It’s not that it’s infeasible per se, but when I explored it the cons outweighed the pros. For instance GMs wouldn’t be able to utilize places in their scenes because they couldn’t see what was going on. Historically people are bad at posing out to the world when they’re in a place, giving players no chance to notice the rising tempers at the back table until suddenly the table gets tossed. And it all wrecks havoc on scene logs because everything’s invisible.
So the Ares places system is just informational. You pose as normal, no special commands. All it does is flag your poses as being in a certain place.
Not saying that’s the only way to do it of course. That’s just the way I thought was the simplest and covered the most cases.
As you suggest, its part of the culture and learning that one doesn't need to respond to all prior 10 people that poses is essential to getting into the flow of 3pr and such.
I agree with you, but I think it goes beyond everyone thinking they need to respond to all 10 people, and more into everyone just paying attention to what's already going on and responding accordingly. Conversations are woven together in a really bizarre fashion, and that's definitely a cultural thing.
Is there a better design to help filter the groups conversing/interacting between their friends to do so in a less distracting manner?
This was something I spent a lot of time on when designing Ares, seeing if it was possible to design a better 'places' system. To be honest, I came up empty. When you consider that the scene needs to feed into a single text log at the end, and that people might flit between places and be at least peripherally aware of what's going on at the others (i.e., those guys are laughing in the corner, that table is having some raised voices, etc.)... it becomes difficult to truly isolate things.
@ghost said in RL-Friendly Game Design:
within those technologies is the answer to taking THIS hobby and moving it into the 21st century.
It depends on what you're looking for really. I'm not interested in "online tabletop" or heavily-tooled games that have integrated battle maps, graphics, etc.
I'm a writer. I want a collaborative writing system with some rules attached.
I know you've said you've been out of MUSHes for awhile so I dunno how much you've seen about the Ares web portal, but it already does things like "chat interfaces that recognize the difference between OOC chatter and IC action". I could add real-time "Faraday is typing..." indicators if I chose to (I just chose not to).
The limiting factor to the next step, in my mind, is the native clients. There's nothing stopping the hobby as a whole from moving toward a Discord/Slack-like client that is a lot more usable than raw text in, raw text out. But that would require a collaboration between the client developers and the server developers that does not yet exist.
@misadventure said in Too Much:
Is anyone interested in this topic as its own thread?
It's not really possible with current MU clients and servers - would require code changes on both sides to add support. But certainly happy to discuss further in a separate thread if desired.
So for all that I've worked to make Ares async-friendly, I don't actually enjoy async RP that much personally. I have had a few good google doc scenes with friends that otherwise wouldn't have happened, but for the most part one of these things happens:
So my version of RL-friendly is planned and short. If it's planned, people can adjust their schedules around it. If it's (reasonably) short, they know they're not going to be at it all night.
This caught me, I don't think I've ever seen you throw in a gif. I laughed, good thing its my planning period and no students where in the room (in which case I wouldn't be on-line but still).
Lol. It's rare for sure. Glad to amuse.
Some day, when I have more time and energy, I want to convince you to help me set up an original space fantasy game.
Sounds fun! When I have more spoons I may run another BSGU spinoff. Continue my battlestar expanded universe. Who knows.
Pose order can be useful for async scenes or play-by-post roleplay so I think it has its place, but I just personally don't enjoy it in an immersive roleplay environment.
Pose order is a conundrum for me. I don't like that it slows things down, but at the same time - without it, I have an even harder time holding the threads of conversations. You'll be in the midst of typing up a reply to one thing someone said, then suddenly somebody else replies to them first and the convo goes off on a tangent and your pose no longer makes any sense. So I view it as a necessary evil. Honestly 3-per and free-for-all pose orders just give me a headache and suck the enjoyment right out of a scene.
Three people is about my limit for a normal scene. Any more than that and I mentally check out. It's just too long between poses or too hard to follow all the threads of conversation. Especially since most players will pose a paragraph replying to multiple people at once. It's like having six different conversations going at a dinner table and you're never sure which ones you need to pay attention to. (name highlighting helps but not enough)
And then DWOPP got with my PC, and we TS'd, and I found out later, and I was, like --
But I mean, my PC was dating his, so I can relate - even if it was solely FTB. To wit, my comment in the other thread:
Setting a shared expectation up front can help, but there are some who will push things even if you're super clear about no TS, no OOC bleed. It's annoying.
BSGU was one of the best experiences I've had in 20+ years. I wish it was still around.
Any more than five or six players and it just gets too much for me. When I did big scenes on BSGU, I would set it up so there were natural ways for folks to break up. So for instance we did a big awards party, and there were a couple different locations - the beach, the bar... I forget the others. Or if there were a big battle, there'd be separate angles. Air wing and marines, or two groups of marines, or whatnot. So it was really like multiple interconnected scenes under the same umbrella.
@derp said in Review of Recent Bans:
What are you guys, idiots? This is obvious to anyone with half a brain you corrupt bunch of fart-sniffing howler monkeys.
I agree with all of your points, except isn't this exactly the sort of conversation that happened every single day in the Hog Pit? I'm not trying to justify that behavior--it's always made me uncomfortable. But when it's the norm, even encouraged, I think maybe it might be worth considering giving people some grace to downshift to a new normal.
If you think the behavior was beyond the pale even by Hog Pit standards, or feel strongly for other reasons that grace isn't warranted, that's entirely your call. As I said, I'm not weighing in on any specific bans, merely speaking in generalities.
@ganymede said in Review of Recent Bans:
but perhaps you are very sad because you're seeing people on both sides who are worthy, valid, and smart at loggerheads. This puts you in a difficult position because you want to enjoy the company of all, but feel you can no longer do so because that might be seen as "taking sides."
I will chime into say that this is how I feel. I have good friends who were banned and good friends who remain, so I feel a bit caught in the middle.
I missed most of what transpired because it was in the opt-in groups, so I am not competent to speak on the merits of any individual ban.
Speaking generally, though:
On the one hand, I believe in the "house party" analogy to forums and games. If you are at a party, and the host asks you to refrain from doing something, you refrain from doing that thing. If you do not, that is a valid reason for you to be asked to leave. Full stop. There are plenty of us who had thoughts and feelings about what went down, yet still managed to respect repeated requests from admin to not throw more gasoline onto the fire.
On the other hand, I realize the above philosophy is not traditionally how MSB has been run. Especially in the Hog Pit, which basically had "call out perceived bad admin behavior" emblazoned on a banner across its door. So I can also understand how people who felt that something untoward was happening felt justified--perhaps even obligated--to speak out despite requests not to.
So mostly I just wish things had gone down differently, on both sides. It sucks to see the community splinter in two because we are not a big community to begin with.
Nevertheless, I support the changes to the code of conduct. I have long been a vocal opponent of the Hog Pit, believing that there was no way for a constructive section to effectively co-exist in a place where people were so used to mudslinging. Bad feelings and behavior constantly spilled over. I am somewhat skeptical about whether people will stay, having lived through similar experiments with ES, IGU, and even my own Ares forums, but I applaud the effort.
@derp said in Positivity Going Forward...:
If there's one thing that we learned when MSB was dying a slow death due to Redis weirdness, it's that there really weren't any alternatives out there if, for some reason, the server that MSB is stored on catches fire tomorrow.
I mean, there have been? Reddit, the Ares forum, the Evennia group... other venues exist and have for years. I'm not saying competition is bad, but people go where the people are. That's been true ever since WoRA and Electric Soup back in the day. I applaud the shift to a more positive environment, but I'm skeptical as to whether the community has the bandwidth to really support multiple forums.
@il-volpe said in RL-Friendly Game Design:
It's really a pity about MUDstats no longer adding new games, because its charts showed you when a game's prime time was.
AresCentral shows it for Ares games. For example: https://arescentral.aresmush.com/game/5e5966e2bbdbe407682b05a2/detail
Though I think what you'll see overall is that activity is a lot flatter than it used to be. With web players popping on throughout the day and people staying logged in to hang out or wait for someone, you don't see the big peaks and valleys that I remember seeing in things like MUDStats ages ago.
@hobos said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:
IC romance does not equal TS at all.
This. My favorite IC romance started off with a random page that went something like: "So I don't do TS but I think it would be hilarious if our chars hooked up for a drunken one night stand and then regretted it." The other player also thought that would be hilarious. We had so much fun with it that the chars awkward-ed their way into dating. They eventually got married and dealt with a whole host of issues from infidelity to infertility. All without a bit of OOC drama or TS.
I wish that were the rule rather than the exception.
@meg said in Mustard MUSH List:
But linking someone else's hard work in your menus comes off a lot like presenting it as part of your site, part of your work.
Ah, I understand. To me it's clear that it's going to an external site so I don't see it as any sort of claim, just a quick reference. But I get where you're coming from.
@Meg If you feel that it would be courteous to ask before linking to something, that's certainly your prerogative to do so. Just seems like a strange thing to expect. I have plenty of MU resources (including now this one) linked from the AresMUSH site and certainly don't feel obliged to ask every individual creator if they're OK with me saying "Hey here's a helpful site, check it out". That's generally not how resource linking works on the internet. YMMV though.
@meg Glitch certainly deserves kudos for designing such a thing (nice job, Glitch!), but I'm confused why you think they would or should ask if he wants it linked. It's a public resource, and it's up to the forum admins to determine which resources they want to allow easy access to for the community.