Posts made by Ghost

RIP Anthem.

7 months.

You had so much potential

@Derp said in Wildly Out of Context:

@Killer-Klown said in Wildly Out of Context:

Said to me, rather than something I said.
"No, it's not a sex toy. It's my sister."

I really want to know the context behind this one, lol.

It would be amazing to no end if two consenting adults legally adopted a sex toy, and the person literally meant "Please stop acting like that sex toy is just an inanimate object, because it is legally my adopted sister."

@SabotKick72 "Take Me Home Tonight" is a jam. Sad news.

I just revealed to my team at work that the weird slightly off-colored line in our team's logo is actually a super-small font wording: #spiceworld2019

Because I put it there.

It's been there for nearly a year.

Booyah.

Edit: because FUCK THEM for not supporting the Spice Girls reunion tour. They called me weird and crazy. Who's laughing now, yah?

Overheard at the office...

"Tell her I've got snipers in my family. I ain't afraid of shit."

@Wretched Haha Haha

Time to book a "company retreat"

Translation: Veiled insult. You're not intelligent. I'm super intelligent.

Moving on.

@Ganymede You're right. Thats where the FFG system falls apart in a MU format.

1. Force points. The villains in the scene are ultimately controlled by the GM. When the GM spends a dark side point, it flips and becomes a light side point that the players can use, which flips to become a dark side point again. These are supposed to exist per number of players per session. A system would have to exist to enable this. Fairly.

2. The "pass, but.." And "fail, but..." results require decision making, and are designed to benefit the dice roller or the target in a PvE type manner. There would need to be guidelines as to good behavior in selecting the results. One of the results is to either add good or bad dice to the next roll. So some dice system that remembers "good but" (hah. Good butt) results or at least has the workable options posted would be necessary.

I feel like the FFG system would be great for MU because the dice are designed to help create RP opportunities.

Try not to think of the "pass, but with drawback" as "lol you pass but fail", but more as "You pass, but something happens in the scene that complicates the scene."

The Pass w Difficulties or Fail with Benefits results apply to both the PCs and Villains, and could go both ways. That Sith could be just about to blow your ship away, but instead they could pass (do damage) but to get the shot they had to skim the deck with their TIE fighter and you'll get an extra round to get away, for example.

If anything, I think MU could do well with dice systems that aid in RP decisions over hard dice systems that are black and white to target number pass/fail. Trinary systems are great.

@Tinuviel said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

There are too many incredibly smart people here, and too many smart people gathered in one place don't make decisions, they make arguments.

No. This isn't what smart people do, and perhaps as a culture it would be better if we didn't apply presumed genius to a group of people who can't get along. Smart people who are invested in a hobby are smart enough to ultimately understand that the hobby would work better if people weren't so constantly distracted with OOC PVP infighting and drama.

It's healthy to question whether or not you like hearing that you're smart or if you're actually using your brain. In this case, we are discussing why new players dont often stick with the hobby. I can ensure you that it's not because the people are just so smart and I was okay with the social issues because everyone was so smart and that's just what geniuses do; they argue.

If you ask me, the social issues have less to do with dogmatic scientific community discourse and more classic high-school territorial pissing contests, but the pissers often liken it to their intelligence or talent because doing so makes it sound less ego-driven than it usually is.

People play MMORPGs because it provides a feeling of reward. It's baked into the psychology of the format: You level up, you get gear, you clear missions, you make progress dozens of times in a single sit-down session of an MMORPG.

MU can be rewarding, yes, but it also can be sitting around for a few hours to find roleplay to begin with, navigating the myriad egos in the hobby, and then spending hours of your day/night trying to accomplish a much smaller number of things in the hopes that it will feel satisfying.

I just don't see this all as very complicated and think a higher-level approach makes it easy to mentally grasp:

1. MU isn't as immediately or frequently rewarding as most other online forms of entertainment.
2. It is difficult to not bump into the social issues on MU. There are large egos, pushy everything has to be my way players, creepers, etc.
3. Unless people are going to commit to working out policies that they intend to enforce and check their own behavior in a meaningful way that involves COMMITTING to identifying where they are part of the problem...theres little point in discussing this.

If #3 is going to be "Everyone else is stupid but me, and I'm not the problem" then you may as well all sign an agreement to meet up once a year for a headcount to see who died that year as the hobby slowly marches off into extinction and further irrelevancy.

People leave the hobby because of people and timesink, and when GOOD players leave because of people(the juice isn't worth the squeeze), the % of people who are hard to deal with (in the population) rises.

And I think the reason why this topic has gone into subtangents about MUCKMOOMUDMUX and into talking about Ruby/Perl etc is because the people in this conversation know that trying to get people to knock it off with obsessive/ego behavior isnt a task, it's a war that will be more difficult and trying than it's worth; it would likely result in the community at each other's throats.

There's so much thin skin in this community you could print a bible on it, so the hopeful sense of things is trying to improve it in some way that doesn't involve actually addressing the behavior of some of these dinosaur players who are the core of this community and this forum...which is why the hog pit is such a cowardly arena where people can throw barbs at each other over minutae.

When I first got into the hobby, I would browse games on Mudconnector. As a new player I didn't give a shit if a game was a MUCK, MUD, MUSH, MOO, etc. I was purely in "I don't care what the nerds call their site. I want to play an RPG.*" mode.

And, honestly, after spending more years in the hobby than I care to count, I still really don't care about the difference between a MOO and a MUCK. I'm willing to bet, though, that the negative social BS on any Mx game similar.

But also, let's not gloss over issues the MU community needs to try to solve (to help keep new blood) by generalizing that all online cultures have problems, or by confusing the issue by claiming MUCK, MUD, MOO, MUX, etc all have entirely different cultures.

I kinda feel like this topic is heading off in a tangent that is avoiding focusing on working on solutions.

I'm pretty sure "people being creepy, elitist, stalker assholes" is a unifying concept most online hobbies deal with. Perhaps one could look to see how some of those communities deal with similar problems to help find good policies?

Then again, let's be fair. Having good policies is one thing, but having staff who enforce policies on MU despite their friendships or agenda to keep the game running and populated is another.

I kinda love that there are people out there that don't like it when people call it "mushing" because of all of the other codebases. It's such a UNIX DORK thing, which reminds me of the old BBS systems back in the day. UNIX guys get all kinds of elitist about HPUX, AIX, using bash, kornshell, perl, etc. All the different codebases are (MUD, MUCK, MOO, etc) are really just customized shell environments built using different approaches with different binary commands, which is exactly what happened through the years with UNIX (AIX, HPUX, VR4, BSD, Linux, etc). Each one of those was "like AIX, but doesn't suck because I wrote commands that compensated for it's lack of...".

Kinda makes me feel like the OGs (as in, not the person who's played of 50000 games, but the ACTUAL godfathers of the hobby) are still out there.

@Wretched So hot.

Your arm is so long, homes.

Anyway I'm not THAT bad. My bruise is almost gone, but its in the...elbow-pit?

@Darren said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Ghost
SHAKA WHEN THE WALLS FELL

OMG did you really make a Darmok reference? Two demerits!

Let me make myself more clear.

Rai and Jiri and Lungha.

and by that I mean...

Rai. And. Jiri at....LUNGHA

Thank you, phlebotomist, for being super rough with my arm. I always wanted to look like a heroin addict. I did.

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Ghost said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Every few months or so I get really loud and shake my cane in the air

Only every few months? ... oh oh, just on this topic, gotcha.

I kind of rotate. I have a circle of life of topics; I'm aware lol.

In my defense, though, I think if you spend enough time on MSB you see various cycles.

Edit: It's like...(roll a d20)

1 Social Dice?
2 Creepers
3 Where in the world is Spider San Diego?
4 The Clique
5 Metagaming
6 Community social issues
8-15 Argue with someone you disagree with until they are dust.
16 Pedophilia on games? Let them do their thing or Kill It With Fire?
17-19 Completely misunderstand some shit but respond with venom, then reroll.
20 People who are cool.

@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Ghost

Yeah, I don't think we'll be doing that.

Why not, though?

I think at this point of the conversation we are discussing how language and habits differ from game to game. Staffers, game-runners, and players all have opinions on what good behavior consists of.

While this community might not be great at communicating with each other without fighting, really the only way to start getting everyone on the same page is to baseline some concepts and work together to define them.

SHAKA WHEN THE WALLS FELL

Every few months or so I get really loud and shake my cane in the air, like I'm some angry old bastard on a porch littered with Budweiser cans:

"THAT'S METAGAMING GOT-DAMMAT."

And a few people will agree, and others will go "No, metagaming is when..."

You know what the community could do? Create MSB posts designed to define metagaming as a conmunity(and link the posts on message boards on games seeking input) that are designed to repeatedly edit the original post. Create a poll: "Are you happy with these definitions?" when it reaches a certain percentage after time, post THOSE definitions as policies.

The community ABSOLUTELY CAN utilize MSB to create community definitions and bylines on things like harassment and metagaming, and carry those from game to game.

Hell, it would be absolutely possible to create a series of guidelines: Harassment, Metagaming, Inclusiveness, Anti-Bullying, etc and wrap them all up as some kind of "COMMUNITY STANDARDS CERTIFIED" label that staff publicly state they support and uphold. Then, games could say things like:

Battlestar Galactica Part 10 is a COMMUNITY STANDARDS CERTIFIED game...