Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

Literally everything is explained and Faraday is incredibly helpful.

@kestrel said in Paying for a MU*?:

At this point, I kind of feel like I should be paid to play someone else's MU*.

My kneejerk reaction there was wow, that's arrogant.

Then I realised that I have been running my own game for three months now for exactly that reason.

So, uh, yeah.

All else aside it's also worth noting that overseas billing can be a pain in the backside and you might easily end up paying more for the bill itself than for the game.

@faraday My parents weren't exactly role models of caring much why the kids were crying. Today, I suspect, a raging ear infection would not go untreated for months or CPS would get involved.

@grayson This is literally how I lost hearing in my right ear at age three. Untreated ear infection, burst eardrum, and then more untreated infection.

If it had been treated I'd still have my hearing, though.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

Ares has an extensive set of tutorials starting from 'hello world' and building up to adding a new field to the web portal. And of course you can always ask on the forums or discord. or page me on the test game or PM me here or send a carrier pigeon... I mean really, there's a lot of avenues for helping people to figure things out.

Credit where credit is due. I have coded for MERC/DIKU and I've done some php but I am by no means a coder -- and I have been able to write a simple plugin or two for Ares based on those tutorials.

@faraday It's all about game culture, not codebase, indeed. Ares makes it easy as pie to set scenes to private or open whether from the client or the portal. The decision to do either lies with the player.

@ell This is also the case on Keys and I know for a fact that we have not changed that there. I think it defaults to open from a client, though.

@silverfox This is unfortunately a very common problem among people with various chronic illness and disability issues. The core of it is often that people grow bitter about all that they are missing out on -- having a life in the conventional sense, being able to go where they want to go, do what they want to do, hold a job, have children, whatever it is that they cannot do. They see others who can get help -- and feel fundamentally cheated.

It's a bad mentality to get into, because who are you going to argue with over it? Disability and/or chronic illness is not a competition. But because aid is often scarce and takes one battle after another to get, ill and/or disabled people often end up in the mindset that it is a battlefield where you are constantly forced to prove that you are sick enough to warrant helping.

Combined with the constant exposure to toxic positivity (don't let the disease rule your life! you can do what you want if you want it enough!) it is very easy to fall into this kind of honestly depression-adjacent mindset.

@faraday I see what you mean. And at the same time -- it would be a return to something far more basic and old-school in a sense, because I can do far better descriptions with words, or with a link to Google maps in case of a contemporary game.

I think this is an argument that is going to go on forever and pretty much come down to what mood a game is trying to set, and what the theme of it is. For your example there? I am seeing something almost Oregon Trail-like in my mind, possibly without the dysentery deaths.

The graphic expression will be of significant importance for something like that, at least. Because what you see will very much set the mood of the setting.

@kestrel That's an interesting idea -- and I'm not sure it's a bad one, either. But to retain a map -- yeah, players will need to be able to pencil in.

What we do on Keys is grow the grid organically based on player requests -- shops, houses. And then we use the real life Google maps of Chincoteague -- if you want somewhere that isn't on the grid, well, it's there, somewhere. Make it up. And if it becomes popular/used enough? We add it to the grid.

Best of both worlds or the laziest cop-out ever, you decide!

@tinuviel On some games, deliberately, because keeping players confused 'keeps the game fresh'. XD

@tinuviel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@l-b-heuschkel Boy, I'm so used to games not having maps that when they do it's as if it's a totally new concept that I love. Every time.

Or the maps were player made and posted on Geocities. XD

@ninjakitten said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

@sunny Huh! I think that'd feel really odd to me. Even though I don't do a lot of grid-walking (I tend to teleport, on any kind of game that lets me) I like having a grid, and walking it at least a few times. It gives me a better feeling for how things are linked up -- that and maps, though ideally both -- which I inevitably need at some point when I have to figure out whether X is a block from Y or all the way across town, or similar. I guess I could probably work with a good, detailed map if there wasn't a grid, as long as things still had descs, but it'd still feel... just weird to me not to have a grid.

Same. I want a grid and an ascii map of the major locations. Not because I need it to navigate, but because it helps me keep an idea in my head of what this place's geography is like, and make sure that that idea is not too different from everyone else's. I suppose a hand drawn map could achieve the same, but there needs to be something, at least.

@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

Ares just makes it a little more explicit than logging in and seeing everybody in private apartments, RP/TP rooms, OOC areas waiting for so-and-so to arrive, or scenes on grid where a page of "Mind if I join?" is met with "Well actually we're kinda in the middle of something..."

Not wrong. The last game I was on that was client-based only (Penn, I think), you almost never saw anyone outside of their private rooms. People sat there until they agreed in pages to go to the private room of someone else and do something. You could walk around the grid for days and never meet a soul.

I won't say it's the only thing that defines a MU* compared to an MMO -- but one of the things is story impact.

On a MUSH, your story impacts the long term story (hopefully). The story develops in form of a back and forth game between you and the storytellers (be they game runners or other players or whatever).

On a game such as WoW, you can roleplay around the story, but the story marches on no matter what you do, and without taking your actions into consideration.

@littlelizard said in Online friends:

@l-b-heuschkel This can happen with real life friendships too, betrayal, ghosting, or just life taking them to a different place. Has and will again. So it's about the same in my estimation.

It can. It's just easier to do online because there is no accountability. And because when you meet face to face, it is often easier to tell if the friendship is really more of a 'I will use you as an emotional dumpster and throw you away when you are full' situation.

Having recently gone through some not so fun situations, this post got me to think about what constitutes friendship online -- and how different people can feel about them.

I tend to think of my friendships online as real. If I am chatting to you about real-life issues, we know the names of one another's cats and spouses -- how is that different from any other friendship? If I am there for you when shit hits the fan and you desperately need somebody to talk to, how is that not friendship?

I've made a fool of myself like this a number of times. Invested a lot of time and energy in a friendship only to find that when I disagreed with the other person about something or I was the one in need of support, they vanished. Last time, they vanished while blaming me for the actions of another player (whom I still agree with, for the record) and telling me I was too exhausting for them to deal with.

They're entitled to that view, of course. But it's an experience that has taught me that while I want to think online friendships are as real as real life ones, they are not. The lack of accountability that you can just block someone if you get bored with them or have sucked them dry -- it means that you are easy prey for a certain kind of people.

And much as I want to get along with everyone, I have to keep that in mind.

For me, it's a simple matter of the Ares web portal doing some things very well and the client doing some things very well. Both can do pretty much what the other can do but some things are simply easier in one than in the other.

In my setup I do poses, forum, wiki-editing, etc on the portal. I do channels, help files, and pages on the client. Spawns means I have easy overview without having to change tabs -- things just scroll along happily outside my browser tab and I click over there when I need to react to something. Just like Discord, really.

Yes. Simply put. More so after I became too disabled to have much of a social life in meatspace.

Making online friends is as joyful. Losing them hurts just as much.