@Seraphim73

Abso-fucking-lutely. At some point over the past few years, it feels like the MU zeitgeist went from improv theatre troupe to one-man shows.

@Seraphim73

People generally don't want to provide that IC backlash because there are a lot of players who respond to any level of IC backlash with something like 'what the fuck? why do you hate me? this is a bullshit grudge and i'm going to staff about it - wait, no, i'm just going to say you're a toxic player to everyone i meet!'

@Miss-Demeanor @WTFE

Honestly, it's pretty disgusting to see people espousing the virtues of bread but refusing to mention the benefits of toast. Shameful.

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

The thing you have to remember about superheroes (I picked this up from reading a comic journalism book about the creation of Spider-Man, newsprint innards and all) is that they're written to appeal to bully personalities to trick them into poor tactics, and that supervillains are all written, in the comics, to appeal to bully victims, to give them various avoidances and escapes from the superheroes. Superdickery, the website sadly departed to us now, had all the top contenders for the writer jokes about the people they had heard about either a) trying to be superheroes, b) possible downfall routes for people that a character appealed to, or c) an in-joke about someone that a writer met that looked like a superhero.

For instance, I have chtirophobic conduct disorder RL, that's the Scarecrow, people that make sibilances (whistling, sing-songs, mutters) are sometimes sociopathic, and the chtirophobia (fear of birds) causes it to piss me off. So, I display sociopathic behavior to anyone that tries a sociopathic tactic. I avoided anything remotely resembling psychology in college, and although I got taken down by some Schulzstaffel types, I recovered by writing and going into the arts (I'm attending school for creative writing and fiction, Batman villains are written a certain way so they make you think about going into an authorship, media related, or artistic profession).

what

seriously i need to know if i'm having a stroke that's affected my ability to read or what

@Apos

Interesting! It does feel a bit ridiculous to be saying 'shit's fucked' to the idea of there being a few thousand players around. Less so, however, when you factor in time zones, schedules, and the fact that I imagine the MU ecosystem is more like a series of independent habitats than something with permeable layers. I mean, we see it here on MSB. There's your WoD players, your Lords and Ladies, your comic-books, and so on.

For example, logging into any MU during my timezone evening, I would be lucky to find maybe 3-4 people who would be active and less so willing to scene.

However, it astounds me that MUs can have so many people on and so few people doing anything.

These days I get all my RP on Champions Online of all places. I think MUs in general could, and should, borrow from conventions of MMO RP more than continue trying to beat the dead horse of tabletop RP (after all, MMO RP is basically MU RP just with a shorter parser and some graphics that no one really considers). MUs are not tabletop games. Tabletop games are, typically, around half a dozen people who have some sort of friendship or connection. MUs are basically randoms trying to herd cats.

Make that as easy as possible.

Generally, my points are what @Rook said. Some of these are with the idea of having less players in mind, others are more general.

1. Narrow the RP. While it was alive, I thought Coral Springs was great for this. All characters were members of the same superpowered academy and everything was set around one seaside town. That's enough breadth to allow for just about any concept but enough limits that any other player could know how to interact with any other player.

2. A general pushback towards pick-up RP. On a lot of games, there's been an increasing penetration of +scenes code. That is, code that allows players to have access to a schedule that allows them to more easily signal when RP will be happening. A great idea, particularly when involving various timezones, but it often seems to lead to a 'one scene per day' culture. And a culture of people just not logging on if nothing is scheduled. If there is a big push to people becoming passive, I would put this right near the top of possible reasons.

3. Push people to go out and RP. The big reason why I RP on CO is that, well, I can log in, hit up the social hub and find 20-30 other people at any one time who are basically down to social RP. From social RP, I might form an OOC chemistry. From there, more detailed RP. Now, it's not necessarily high-quality RP, but that's okay -- and it leads into my next point...

4. Dispel the notion that 'more words = better than'. I would rather have a few quick lines to create a tense, exciting back-and-forth dynamic than waiting ten or fifteen minutes for two or three paragraphs. Something verbosity or detail is appreciated, but often it is meaningless. If people can only afford to log in for an hour or two, then there are ways to make it a good hour or two.

5. Active staff who model the above behaviors -- without thinking this makes them some kind of martyr. I'd say something like this is key to combatting the players who are lazy or entitled. Like it or not, staff are more than custodians of the server who keep the lights on.

6. Truly consider whether XP systems are necessary and beneficial to any particular game. As much as I like having some numbers and stats, there are plenty of games I've played on with XP which I've never ever spent. I think you need a simple system for conflict resolution and that's about it. I would be interested in seeing a MU run with something like the PDQ ruleset.

7. Actually utilise the unique aspects of the MU medium. Let players create things, let players affect the world. If people feel a sense of connection, they might be more inclined to stick around and do things. It's one thing to have Generic Bar and it's another to have Generic Bar where it says that my character is the local pool champion, y'know?

8. Consider reaching out to other communities to find players. This whole hobby needs a transfusion of new blood and it needed it years ago.

I think the key thing is that this hobby needs to find some way of modernizing itself. That doesn't mean reinventing the wheel but it sure as hell means acknowledging it exists. MU games are a unique art form but they're also basically 20-30 years old, designed in a world of different people, different technology and different expectations.

This is always an interesting topic.

I run scenes on a constant, consistent basis because I enjoy RP and my timezone makes it very difficult to attend scenes I like the look of (they start at, say, 4:00am my time, for example). So, I run scenes to remain active in the communities I join. However, because of the spotlight thing, my own characters are relegated to background positions which means these characters that I create and/or have to put in applications or be approved inevitably don't end up really doing much.

It sometimes gets to the point where I'd rather just be given a GM bit and let to go wild with NPCs and setting stuff because then I wouldn't feel like my own character is being kept under the stairs, so to speak.

The other thing about the idea that you can't run things for yourself, which is a good rule, is that it runs into issues. Let's say you're on a WoD game and you're playing a mortal detective. You'd like to do some journalism but no one is willing to run it - everyone wants to run Elysium things about the Clan and Covenant political maneuvering. So, what do you do? Do you just sort of ignore your character? Do you run a scene about investigating a spooky murder which is really just for your benefit? Do you page and @mail and +bbpost things until someone bites to run it for you, basically making them give up their time for your development? It's tough. Ideally, staff would be running things like this.

It's a huge problem when people just start running things for themselves because, soon enough, everyone is doing it. But I think it's also a problem when players have to rely on other players to run things for their own characters. I think it's also a problem when all charbits are expected to be Schrodinger's GMs - if I'm a detective, I might not want to also be the entire police department.

wait the game that seems to derail almost every thread on MSB on a regular basis has significant problems

well, color me shocked

It's almost as if there's a big ol' tension between the people who have their own story first in their mind and the people who are more willing to get screwed by a random roll of the dice.

I also think people who are comparing MUs to writing a story or watching a TV show are missing the point. Even appealing to tabletop is a bit odd. A MU is none of those things, not really - it is far closer to improv theatre. In a MU, you're not always the protagonist or the biggest star. Sometimes, your character is the guy who shows up in the background or delivers a key to the person who will Do Things.

I really like surrendering part of my character's agency to the dice or to the whims of other players. This is, however, incresingly hard to find.

What isn't increasingly hard to find are people who, say, taunt a character for half a dozen poses, or even attack them, and then attempt to no-consent out of consequences.

Unfortunately, a lot of players are realising that they can hide behind the banner of Consent-Based Ar Pee when things they don't like happen and there simply aren't enough players who will call them on that selfish, dishonest behavior.

My personal approach to my consent is as follows: Ultimately, my consent trumps anything and everything, which means it is not something I revoke casually. If someone says they want to stab my character out of the blue, I'll allow it, with the understanding that the worst my character will get is a few days in hospital. If my character dies, it will be at a suitably dramatic moment, or because I've grown tired of playing them. PC/PC conflict will always be settled by a mechanical system where possible, simply because it is the fairest way of doing it, and I will not complain about either result - even if I go into it knowing I have a disadvantage.

Multi User Shared Hallucinations aren't, y'know, singular hallucinations. The whole thing falls apart when people forget that the text reality is made up of more than themselves.

You can't. Honestly, a lot of games should consider not having them.

What I mean, of course, is not having an 'OOC Lounge'. You might have a Starting Room or a Waiting Room or a OOC Space, but it isn't exactly for talking or hanging out in. If you log on, you should be there to play. I'm not actually sure what the purpose is with these spaces beyond some kind of thought that games must have a place to "hang out."

Or, if you have them, remove the ability to speak and emote.

It's a game first, hang out spot second. There shouldn't really be any rooms that aren't conducive to people logging on and going IC, and an OOC Lounge can be a problem. It's easier to talk in the OOC lounge than it is to scene, after all, and a lot of MUers are nothing if not creatures-of-least-resistance.

Or, if you must have one, you need some way of monitoring what's going on. Whenever I visit an OOC Lounge and see the same people complaining about LOL THIS FUCKING GUY ON LEAGUE or :scoffs at YoutubeCelebrity's Latest Video or giving a play by play of their latest game or LP or whatever else meaningless bullshit that doesn't relate to anything on the actual MU, well...

@thatguythere

Ooof. You're actually mistaking it for gentrification. As I said, you betray your own lack of in-depth understanding.

@salty-secrets

I can't believe I forgot to mention the LE stuff as an example. While it's certainly within the umbrella of my first dot point, that kind of behavior will have me drop a game immediately. It's a big part of the reason why I can't ever seriously think of going back to MCM. The whole LE thing reads out like some kind of weird farce when you lay it out.

I'd leave a game if I found out Elsa was on staff, too. But it's probably more accurate to say -- along with some of the other things I listed -- that I'd never join a game with those issues in the first place.

@ThatGuyThere

Then you betray a lack of understanding on the difference between real spaces and online spaces when it comes to that discussion. For better or worse, online spaces are not restricted by the typical elements -- things like geography or language or peer group association -- that do wonders to constrain ideological/cultural drift.

To use your analogy, no one has ever walked into a punk club and, over time, attracted more of their friends and turned the punk club into a hiphop club by inches and degrees simply because the punk club is the most popular one around.

Multiverse MUSH, to use an example as it has been discussed, is a distinct culture of 'possums' that fell prey to the exact issues described. To illustrate it, MCM was built around a neverending war between two Multiversal 'superfactions' set on and around a superplanet. You could app just about anything but you were expected to adjust for tone and the MCM 'world'.

MCM grew popular whereupon people were joining it because it was something like #6 on MUDStats and promoted a wide scope of playable concepts. These players had little interest in actually engaging with the wider theme and would frequently argue against being required or even expected to do so. This is because they were looking for an active RP location more than they were looking for what MCM was specifically (the same reason why Shang attracts such a wide and varied crowd who seem to also hate the game as a whole*).

While this tension had always been something of an issue (MLP theme), it eventually culminated in things like people making accusations of isolationist 'mini-MUs' among the playerbase and something of a coup from the headwiz. As best can be determined, the coup came down to the first Headwiz wanting the game to get back to its PvP factional roots and was willing to threaten to shut the whole thing down to do so. This resulted in some of the staff establishing a copy on the new, and current, server. This was all kept hush-hush until someone spilled the beans semi-recently, years after it happened.

• -- funnily enough, Shang's big loss of players event (changing the minimum character age) is much closer to the sort of behavior you're saying -- ideological drift over a long period by an increasing number of people due to changing norms (basically gentrification, really) -- as opposed to what is mentioned by that author in particular, which is people joining a community despite not actually caring about what makes it a community beyond a social space.

@sunny

No problem! It's a good article and the best way I've seen of explaining the issue that all online communities -- perhaps all communities -- inevitably face.

Oh, and when there are too many goddamn otters.

It's been a long time since I've really MU'd to the extent that I barely consider myself a part of the community I've adored for just about twenty years. Some of what I'm about to put down apply to the games I'd been on for years that I stopped playing over a year ago.

Presented in no particular order.

• Staff making unethical decisions. This can include staff lying to players.
• Staff not doing their jobs, from not creating RP to flat out not running the game. This is one reason why I left Coral Springs.
• Players being put in influential positions when they are not suited to it.
• General game setting breakdown. To name an example, I joined MCM and found most of my fun there with the PvP narrative. When people started to turn against that, I had much less impetus to play there. This may also include concept bloat.
• A certain amount of players who might not break rules but are just annoying. These are the sorts of people who dominate +pub channels with their day-to-day minutiae and never seem to actually RP.
• Similar to the above, people who sit in the OOC lounge and/or peanut gallery without RPing.
• Again, related. Whisper campaigns, directed at myself or others. A growing awareness of how common this was on MCM is a big reason why I left, particularly when one was apparently being run against me by a player who was otherwise polite and pleasant to me.
• A character of mine loses a friend, ally, enemy, lover, etc who I enjoyed playing with. The headache of trying to finangle an IC reason to explain an OOC absence is not worth it and I'll frequently get bored and drop the character.
• A lack of attention to spelling, grammar and general basic level of effort stuff among the playerbase. This is a textual medium and you should take pride in your words.
• An inability to run scenes, plots or characters with consequence. I like coffee chat RP but only because it allows you explore those consequences.

Really, it comes down to the fact that I'm joining a game to play a game. If I can no longer do that, I'll leave. I will put up with a lot if I can continue playing the game I joined to play. I will put up with a lot because I'm in the Australian timezone and that basically prevents you from engaging with most MUs at a convenient time.

The Expanse TV series is a fantastic adaptation. I'm a big fan of the books and the TV series is basically perfect.

It helps that they have the book writers heavily involved. And it helps that the book writers see it as a chance to sort of make the story a bit better, given the weird production hell the Expanse series has had. First it was going to be three books, then during the third book it was extended to four, then six, then during the fourth book it was extended to nine.

Also, the actor for Amos had read all the books prior to auditioning and basically came in and said "I want to be Amos". He's nailed the character so well. They all have, really.

The reason introductions suck is because a lot of people approach them as like interrogations.

"What's your name? How long have you been [around here/on this ship/doing this thing]? Where are you from?"

It's never natural.

@Lisse24

I'm only singling you out because you volunteered, and what I'm about to say is probably arising from never working a job where I could login somewhere.

Isn't this a problem? Whenever I log into somewhere and see a WHO list populated by people who've been idle for hours, days, maybe even weeks, I really do start to wonder why they're even online. To me, when I log in, I log in with a purpose: I want to RP very soon.

Couldn't this sort of breed a culture where the idea isn't logging in to play so much as it is just logging in out of habit?

@AlexRaymond -- I actually think it is that, that there are still a lot of people who might log in a bit every week but don't really play. And, in my mind, they don't qualify as active MUers.

edit: For example, I know a RP friend who logs into their charbit on a MU every few weeks for literally a minute, seemingly enough to keep it alive, but that's it. They've been doing this sort of pattern for like two years. Technically active, sure. But I also wonder why they do so, and why they've been doing it for so long.

@Apos

Interesting! It does feel a bit ridiculous to be saying 'shit's fucked' to the idea of there being a few thousand players around. Less so, however, when you factor in time zones, schedules, and the fact that I imagine the MU ecosystem is more like a series of independent habitats than something with permeable layers. I mean, we see it here on MSB. There's your WoD players, your Lords and Ladies, your comic-books, and so on.

For example, logging into any MU during my timezone evening, I would be lucky to find maybe 3-4 people who would be active and less so willing to scene.

However, it astounds me that MUs can have so many people on and so few people doing anything.

These days I get all my RP on Champions Online of all places. I think MUs in general could, and should, borrow from conventions of MMO RP more than continue trying to beat the dead horse of tabletop RP (after all, MMO RP is basically MU RP just with a shorter parser and some graphics that no one really considers). MUs are not tabletop games. Tabletop games are, typically, around half a dozen people who have some sort of friendship or connection. MUs are basically randoms trying to herd cats.

Make that as easy as possible.

Generally, my points are what @Rook said. Some of these are with the idea of having less players in mind, others are more general.

1. Narrow the RP. While it was alive, I thought Coral Springs was great for this. All characters were members of the same superpowered academy and everything was set around one seaside town. That's enough breadth to allow for just about any concept but enough limits that any other player could know how to interact with any other player.

2. A general pushback towards pick-up RP. On a lot of games, there's been an increasing penetration of +scenes code. That is, code that allows players to have access to a schedule that allows them to more easily signal when RP will be happening. A great idea, particularly when involving various timezones, but it often seems to lead to a 'one scene per day' culture. And a culture of people just not logging on if nothing is scheduled. If there is a big push to people becoming passive, I would put this right near the top of possible reasons.

3. Push people to go out and RP. The big reason why I RP on CO is that, well, I can log in, hit up the social hub and find 20-30 other people at any one time who are basically down to social RP. From social RP, I might form an OOC chemistry. From there, more detailed RP. Now, it's not necessarily high-quality RP, but that's okay -- and it leads into my next point...

4. Dispel the notion that 'more words = better than'. I would rather have a few quick lines to create a tense, exciting back-and-forth dynamic than waiting ten or fifteen minutes for two or three paragraphs. Something verbosity or detail is appreciated, but often it is meaningless. If people can only afford to log in for an hour or two, then there are ways to make it a good hour or two.

5. Active staff who model the above behaviors -- without thinking this makes them some kind of martyr. I'd say something like this is key to combatting the players who are lazy or entitled. Like it or not, staff are more than custodians of the server who keep the lights on.

6. Truly consider whether XP systems are necessary and beneficial to any particular game. As much as I like having some numbers and stats, there are plenty of games I've played on with XP which I've never ever spent. I think you need a simple system for conflict resolution and that's about it. I would be interested in seeing a MU run with something like the PDQ ruleset.

7. Actually utilise the unique aspects of the MU medium. Let players create things, let players affect the world. If people feel a sense of connection, they might be more inclined to stick around and do things. It's one thing to have Generic Bar and it's another to have Generic Bar where it says that my character is the local pool champion, y'know?

8. Consider reaching out to other communities to find players. This whole hobby needs a transfusion of new blood and it needed it years ago.

I think the key thing is that this hobby needs to find some way of modernizing itself. That doesn't mean reinventing the wheel but it sure as hell means acknowledging it exists. MU games are a unique art form but they're also basically 20-30 years old, designed in a world of different people, different technology and different expectations.

I don't think the MU community feels more passive. At least, not for no real reason.

I think the MU community is suffering from an increasingly low number of players. I would wager there are only a few hundred unique IPs left across all the major MUs.

I think your three ideas are great, @Rook. And not just because I said something similar a few months back!