Best posts made by Ganymede

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The idea of a grid? Even in the telnet version, I'm moving away from that with my scene system. By refocusing our RP around the idea of scenes, the grid becomes unnecessary. Give folks a map and some pre-defined locations/descs and they can go to to town.

True story: Victorian Reverie was the first game I played on which didn't have a Grid, but, instead, places of public interests to RP in. This was almost ten years ago. We didn't have the scene system, but it really would have helped a lot.

The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.

@reimesu said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

We're not. We're just loud.

And ugly.

@surreality

My short review of Equilibrium:

Ah, what is there left to say about this cult-classic? Visually-impressive. Stimulating ideas. All good bits for a good movie. And, really, Equilibrium is a good movie.

Yet much about it seems fashioned from the same puerile sense of style that followed The Matrix. Allusions to Christian myth -- John Preston / Prester John -- aren't easily overlooked, especially when the "soldiers" are called clerics. The whole idea is a mish-mash of nerd fantasy -- oh, let's use angles and mathematics to explain this gun kata martial arts crap! Yay! Woo! At least The Matrix didn't demean us with that crap.

There's little I liked in Equilibrium that I didn't find and enjoy in Tank Girl, but that movie didn't try to keep things serious for us, and wallowed in its comical nature. In the end, all of the glitzy coolness of Equilibrium is eaten up by the banality of its over-wrought polemic: that its wrong to tamp down creativity and emotion in favor of logic and formula.

So, aside from the visuals, it's hard to truly marvel at the movie, which gets consumed by its own sense of self-importance. It's almost enough to drown out the ironic play between the message and the movie's similarities to The Matrix.

Almost.

@Alzie said:

Docker basically runs a mini-vm on your machine which sets up a service for you so
that you don't have individually manage the service and setup yourself. In this case, it installs a working pennmush game with my Mu2 for you and Mysql already connected (MariaDB is the mysql server), already setup so that all you have to do is put in what port you want to use and run it.

So, if I were to ask you to, you could set up a WoD game in a matter of minutes?

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.

It's a really cool feature. You could basically have a whole swath of unlinked rooms, all parented to the appropriate rooms that have things like the weather, the time, the date, and so on, and so on. I think this system is really revolutionizing the way I see MU*s and what can be done with them.

I mean, I've crowed about your stuff before, but this is incredible.

I have an idea for another feature that might be very popular, but, like, that's not for this thread.

@faraday

Your last paragraph illustrates what I think is an important social force on these games: success is always expected.

I’m not sure how to address it mechanically. This is a matter of who you can attract to your game. BSG:U had a lot of great players who were unafraid of failing, but did not set out to do so. And those are the kind of players you can build a game around.

The desire to have a great character and to be a good player are two separate things, and I would encourage game designers to seek and prioritize the latter.

@Sunny

You're not the crazy one.

@Lithium said in FATE/Disapora/Similar:

CoD is actually a fairly solid system if you remove all the supernatural splats and abilities from it. As mortal only it's fairly balanced.

I concur.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm for a project against a barrage of criticism. A bug is a bug, but it matters whether you report it as "Grr, this is broken again..." or "FYI I stumbled across this..."

I'm going to try to remember to always connect to BSG:U via the web portal. I want to get to feel it out better.

When I played Arx, I hated the web portal. But that's probably because I'm an old fart.

Gonna try harder, you whippersnappers.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

It's perfectly legitimate to feel disappointment.

I concur with this. I don't mean to suggest that players should just deal with failure as it comes because it is an inevitability. (This is in accord with my adherence to the Path of Emo.) I mean to say that I think it is a good idea to promote the concept of choice, and that the available systems, particularly the Chronicles of Darkness, does a good job in not only providing choice, but also a little sugar to make the pill easier to swallow, e.g., the Sanctity of Merits rule. Having that sugar I think substantially improves the chances that players will not be as soured long-term in failures, especially if they had a bit of a hand in it.

That said, and ultimately, whether IC failures cut like a knife or not largely depends on the game's culture.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

This was a cyst that went over the top batshit. What you're describing about the gland isn't far off, though this wasn't reeking bacterial gloop, just blood and LOTS of plasma.

Good thing it wasn't a hematoma.

I was actually hoping someone would look up bursting Bartholin's glands. Because it's kind of gross mid-coitus, y'know?

@Lisse24 said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I'm often frustrated on MUs in the disconnect between what you're expected to know to do and what's explained to you. MUs are not user friendly, not because telnet (although that to), but just because they don't tell you basic things and almost always assume some level of base knowledge, instead of assuming no base knowledge.

So, this really has nothing to do with UX, or MUDs, or MUSHes? It has to do with the lack of communication by staff when it comes to their policies.

I'm good with that.

But that has nothing to do with UX, or MUDs, or MUSHes, right? It has to do with the slipshod way many games arise, or the poor way games explain how to go about making a PC.

It's about communication, if I'm following you.

If that's a case, then shouldn't the topic be: why the hell can't staff be assed to properly document shit before rolling it out?

@sunny said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Both Ares and Evennia (new platforms) have the ability to do this (and the flagship games for both do it), so I'm not sure what you're basing this on.

I think it would be fair to say that, aside from Arx, BSG:U, and 5th Kingdom, games don't allow you to build your own code bits and objects. We used to have those back in the 90s on games, remember?

passes over the sweet tea

Yep, back in the good ol' days.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that, since then, there was a crackdown on @quota. I mean, as a poll, how many other games out there allow their PC objects to start with @quota? On Fallcoast, quotas are disabled, for example. Quite a few new players I've met don't know how to @dig rooms or connect exits, or even do @osuccs accurately, but these were the sorts of skills most players had about 15 years ago.

Anyhow, I'm glad we're moving back to allowing PC objects some amount of @quota to play with.

@Derp

I think you missed the point of what TNP was implying about internet anonymity.

@Coin said in Good TV:

It's literally "we burn these cities to the ground to fulfill some stupid cycle of burning cities to the ground because that's what we're here for because apparently cities have expiration dates that we decide".

"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished."

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I'm a bit confused about your point, because my entire argument is "make shit simpler" and "things could be simpler". What is there to disagree with? I'm not saying don't add new features, don't innovate or try new things. I'm saying that if you're gonna do it, don't make it a complete mess that needs 5 help files to explain how to use something.

You're presuming that people want it simpler. This is not always the case. People may want to simplify how things are done, but this doesn't necessarily mean keeping "things simple." As an example, people on Arx seem to want to add complexity to it.

I would assume that if you logged into a game that you want to play, and you thought it was way simpler than previous games you've played, while having the same basic functionality, you would think it was an improvement. I highly doubt you or anyone else would go "Well, shit, I miss when my syntax had needless complications".

Presuming that it's within the same system, sure. That'd be nice. But CoD isn't that clean when the powers have different rolls. It'd be very hard to boil it down to FS3's level of simplicity. And I can appreciate the difference, and not try to wedge a square block into my round hole.

It hurts.

@Tempest

Shav made her staff give up a lot to get her system working. And it did, for a while. She just did not want to relinquish control, and elected not to. That doesn't mean that RfK's political system was flawed.

CoFaB was also pretty nifty and workable.

We could pull lessons from these places and work on the ideas. We haven't. That's what I'm more interested in than "how can I make +roll simpler?" or "how can I make +jobs more user friendly?".

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Are they really doing the same things though? Smashing the do you have a coder flowchart that has hindered the creation of games for 25 years. Making it orders of magnitude easier to learn to code, as @Tat mentioned. Creating a seamless web/wiki/game integration. These are things that, to the best of my knowledge, haven't been done before.

All of this may be true, but good games differ from one another. Your package may have all of the great features we've come to know and love, but I don't think, for example, that the developers are interested in coding up special, unique features for each game.

I could be wrong, mind.

@Warma-Sheen said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

Bad players and bad STs just look at the dice and say, "Oh. I died. That's dumb." "Yep. Sux bro."

I concur. Sadly, few systems tell you how to play through the situation and many players I don't think have the creativity to look beyond the mechanical result.

The dice can guide the story, but it doesn't have to dictate it. The dice are there to add elements of random chance to direct the story in ways you don't have to decide, not to force your characters into crappy stories.

While this is a truism, I think players differ on what is or is not a "crappy story." I mean, people really like the Twilight series, for example.

What other storytelling medium has 134 main characters.

Apparently, the Stranger Things series.

You're so uptight that --

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/uranus-is-probably-full-of-giant-diamonds/ar-AAqHhTY?li=BBnbfcL

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I can't see any particular reason why people would not want it to be simpler to do the things they're already doing. Unless you're talking from the perspective that I talk about rice cookers. I only hate rice cookers because I think they're lazy as shit when you can get a pot and learn to cook some freaking rice. But I don't really see where the pride is in not simplifying code syntax so that people can focus on doing things rather than how to do them.

Let me try to explain this in another way.

The number of headstaff on CoD games in particular that are also code-savvy is miniscule. In many cases, game owners rely on coders, and it has been this way for quite a while. We can all agree that it would be great if the headstaff was also conversant and capable in code, but that's not always the case. My understanding from my limited MUD experience is that the headstaff were.

I'm not conditioned that things can't be better. I'm conditioned to accept that unless I want to devote the time and energy to learning code, I will be relying on someone else. And I'm not going to lecture that someone else on what is or is not difficult to do. That's a very good way for me to lose my coder, and I'm not in a position to do that.

And for the record, I use rice cookers when I don't want to spend my energy focusing on cooking the rice.

And to the potential question of "who are you to say what is better", I'd say that anything that harms no one, makes doing something simpler, and gives you all of the options you had before without the mess, and most likely faster than before, is objectively better.

Excellent. Then do it. Why are you here attempting to lecture us?

Go. Do it. We'll wait.

Alright but I'm interested in lowering the barrier to entry into this hobby, and getting rid of all the nonsense people think is perfectly acceptable, which is why I made this topic and other topics. If you're not interested then what do you solve by expressing your disinterest?

I'm solving as much as you are by posting. I'm providing a reasonable counter-opinion here.

You talk about lowering the barrier to entry by improving user experience, and then hook on improving or simplifying code. I previously stated that you could improve user experience by enhancing communication of commands and processes, but this has nothing to do with code syntax. I more recently stated that I'm more interested in ideas that improve the user experience through game policies that add interesting RP elements, like politics, an economy, etc., but this also has nothing to do with code syntax.

And, as said above: if you are a coder, fantastic. Go and improve our commands and code, please, by all means. But it's not my focus or interest because I lack that skill set, and I'm not going to start rattling a cage for something I cannot do myself.

In the mean time, what I will do is suggest and propose things that I can implement, if I had my own game.