Posts made by GamerNGeek

@wolfs Pyro, right? Several players asked staff to do something about him. And the replies were always negative.

@cupcake This mirrors my experience there too. Staff might be nice enough, but as they said in their own ads, these were basically OLTTs that went to full-open, and it shows. Staff clearly had their favourites, and most others tended to be treated as walking, talking NPCs so they could show off how awesome they were. There was very little effort given to impartiality or fair staffing, just a "this is our game and if you don't like it, bye".

Admittedly, that last is every game; no one has a /right/ to play anywhere. But most players expect to be on a level playing field, and if not, well, vote with your feet. Which several people have done.

@ixokai Not really. If I wanted to play a Year One Batman, I link to a good Batman wiki writeup (there are lots), and type &differences me=As per link, but cutoff at Year 1. Also, his Robin is Jason Todd, not Dick Grayson.

Done. Finis. Asking for any more is really redundant busywork. Asking people to write up skills and powers is just that. We all know what skills Batman has. We all know what skills Peter Parker has. We know what powers Superman has. And if we didn't, somehow, we click the wiki link and read, same as we would +sheet, except without all the rigamarole.

@the-tree-of-woe said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@ixokai It's not without its bugs. I'm mostly mulling ways you could get away from the traditional model of app-writing. It's ancient, and while it's still serviceable I can't help but feel like there's got to be a better way to handle it.

Honestly, there is. Just that most of the dinosaurs would never consider it. The answer is: get rid of applications. Your application becomes a link to a wiki with data about your character, like Comicvine or Wikipedia. You can write up a "Differences" paragraph, and go "My character is this, but X". Let's face it...we all KNOW these characters. Everyone on the planet knows Batman. And if someone is apping for Cannonball, odds are good that, yeah, they know Cannonball. What good does it do ANYONE to make people retype and regurgitate info we already know and which is easily available online. None. It's like the long apps of old. In a day when Wikipedia didn't exist, they maybe made some sense. Now? None.

FASERIP is available for free on the web. One could post every bit of relevant information on the news/wiki and not have to worry about copyright.

Marvel Heroic is not only NOT free, but is no longer sold or available since Margaret Weis let the license lapse.

One of these is the clearly superior choice for doing an internet game with people who don't want to spend money.

FFG's new Star Wars engine blows Saga and D6 out of the water, in that it actually feels like Star Wars. But then, that would require Mushers to do something new. Which means it will never happen.

@Lithium said in Chime's MOO thread:

@Chime I wouldn't discount the option of coding mux like commands into moo, it'd make it a lot easier for people who are used to that code to jump into the game and get involved. If the commands aren't what people are used to they tend to simply walk away.

Or make a really solid tutorial so that people can get the information on how to use the code upfront

THIS. I can't count how many times I've gone to a game, and run into this. Honestly, if I go to your game and type "+help", "news", "+where", or "+who" and I DON'T get usable input back, you've lost me.

We are, as a community, a bunch of dinosaurs. It doesn't matter if it's BETTER, but if it's DIFFERENT, you've lost us. You can put in new things, you can run on a different engine, but "backwards compatibility" must be 100% or you lose people. Sad, but true.

Lots of projects over the years have not thrived because of that simple truth. Hell, I once was on a Mush where I wanted to do something as simple as replace the "+" in +commands. Make it so "+finger" was just "finger" and "+where" was just "where". I got SO many complaints it was unbelievable. So the old + versions went in as aliases. I kept my new, but kept the old too, and people seemed okay with it.

Of course, the whole "how dare you ask me to pay to play this" is part of, honestly, why mushing is so far behind the times. Hosting often costs money. It takes staff time. All of that is "money" in some form. And yet the players are all "why, how dare you ask me to pay money??!?!?!!?WTF?!?!? What makes you think I have money?" I've seen people talking about college students, who are apparently begging on the street corners like little Orphan Oliver, going "May I have some more, sir?" rather than buying $8.00 lattes at Starbucks except waitnotheyaren't.

You want the solution to some of mushing's woes? Look to the pay to play models on MMOs. These companies make money hand over fist, even on "free to play" MMOs. One basic idea (on the good ones) is you can either spend your time, or spend your money. Invent a virtual currency like these games do. Hand them over for time-spent. You're online, you're active? Congratulations, you earn 5 ArrPee a week. You can spend 20 to buy yourself a "Premiere character slot", which you can spend on playing something that honestly will work fine, but which we in our batshit mush culture have decided would break the universe if everyone got to play it because no one wants to be a special snowflake ever.

Orrrrrr, you can Paypal to a game account, and 1 dollar gets you 5 ArrPee. If you told me I could either have to get +votes or submit logs or WTFery else five times a week to get my 5 ArrPee, or I could just kick in 4 bucks to do the same? Fuck, I can't buy LUNCH for 4 bucks. Here. Hell, have a tip. Give me my shinies and let me burn my time having FUN. Someone who in theory can't afford 4 bucks? (And if not, how do they have a computer?) Let them earn it.

But it's BETTER, guys. It's an IMPROVEMENT. Never mind that we don't like it and didn't ask for it and was poorly implemented. It's NEWER. And that makes it BETTER. At least that's what the fanboy apologists will keep telling us.

@Miss-Demeanor I'll just say this last, since this IS the Announcement forum, and getting into a scrap here isn't what it's intended for. Fuck you. You're not a moderator. And on top of it, you yourself have done your share of pissing and moaning both in this thread, and other forums than the Hog Pit. So, take your opinions and your attempts to look like you're important and fuck right off.

No matter how anyone tries to spin this, an upgrade was done that was of questionable need, and worse, it was pushed live with a theme that literally prevented multiple people here from being even abe to read the forums. That is bad policy, and until or unless the administrators decide otherwise, I have the ability to state my opinion of it. If you don't like it? Quit your bitching or go elsewhere.

@Miss-Demeanor You know what? Once I set up my Mush Client? It works. And then I leave it alone. Ans the whole "it's only two steps" is horseshit. Clearing your browser cache is inconvenient as shit, since it clears a bunch of the things you autofill on sites. Having to inconvenience myself and re-enter data for dozens of sites because of ONE that decided it needed to break shit that already worked ISN'T COOL. If you want to upgrade things? Make sure they WORK first. That's what testing environments are for. Not pushing things to live.

So we had a forum that worked for everyone, and replaced it with one that works for a number less than everyone, and makes everyone go through extra steps, and changed things we were familiar with because....?

Sometimes leaving things that work alone is the better answer.

It's not working at all on my version of Chrome. The three lines don't pop up the menu, and the base screen is blank. Works on Firefox, but not Chrome.