Firefly - Still Flyin' is open again, and welcomes new guests and characters!

As many of you saw, we had some recent trouble. @browncoat (Londinium) and I (Osiris) really appreciate the show of support that came about from that unpleasant situation. As was said over on that thread - I'm really glad to see games start to work together to block harassment, for the good of the hobby. We want our game (like any, I'm sure) to be fun and welcoming, and we will do what is necessary to keep it that way. So... troublemakers not welcome. Everyone else, please come check us out!

Soapboxers -
A friend and I have created a new Firefly Mush and just opened for beta! We invite you all to come check things out.

Our wiki is here: http://firefly-mush.wikidot.com/

Guest access and character creation are now open!

Connect at firefly.silvertree.org 2517

As you may recall, just about a year ago I came to this forum to try and get people interested in returning to that other Firefly mush. The one with all of the problems. It sparked some good discussion, and got my friend and I working on a new game to provide a fresh start. We're still setting things up and welcome constructive feedback and of course active players.

Relevant info:

• it's on PennMush with FS3.
• we don't plan to do lots of coded systems. we love collaborative storytelling.
• we've built out a grid for Eavesdown as a central RP hub. we haven't set up other planets yet.
• we intend to have basic flight code to move ships between planets, nothing fancy. that's not set up yet.
• we are open for beta. we will do a character reset at the end of the beta period.

Again, check out our wiki for more, drop us an email with any questions, and come join us in the Verse!

Osiris (and Kirie and Donna) on FSF
Serenity: Donna from the Guan-Yin, Yvandra from the Redemption, the current Zoe.

So - we have a troublesome player who has shown up on our new game today, insisting that we let him join. He made veiled threats about posting here on MUSoapbox, to warn you all about what we are doing - which felt like trying to blackmail us into agreeing to his side, so that he wouldn't tarnish our reputation here.

What we are really doing is drawing a line against bullying and manipulation, both of which we feel he used against us today as we tried to talk through things... and protecting our playerbase against even worse scenarios, which are something we've seen him involved in, in the past.

Yes, it would be lovely to offer him a fresh slate and a second chance on our game, since that's the point of the entire game. We deliberated and talked to him about this, but don't feel that it can work out.

Now that we have decided not to allow him on our game, I fully expect that he'll post here. I'm glad to discuss matters. I'm not willing to compromise the safety of the players on my game. That is all.

We have just moved our Firefly game to AresMush, and we're open for new players!

Come play in the Firefly/Serenity 'Verse. Our game has a strong storytelling focus, and is very light on coded systems. Play is currently based in Eavesdown on Persephone, with the option to play on ship crews as well. Hope to see you there!

Learn more at https://firefly-stillflyin.aresmush.com/

I'm Osiris on there, and run the game with Londinium.

Hi all,
As promised, @browncoat and I have been discussing and working on our security setup and admin policies for FSF. We've just posted an improved policy on our wiki. There will be no DARK snooping on players. We will, if necessary, set people SUSPECT and whenever possible communicate with them as that happens rather than doing so silently. Thanks again to those of you who engaged us in discussion on all of this - our goal is to create a good, solid game where people can have fun playing together in the Firefly Verse.

Another improvement: we've just opened up guest access to the game (and to the +newbie channel, in-game) so that people can drop in and talk to us before creating a character. We hope to add player-spawning of characters soon. For now, that step still goes through an email, and we'll be glad to set people up.

Come say hi!

firefly.silvertree.org 2517

Osiris

Okay, I've caught up all of this now that I'm home from work. Quite a lively discussion.

If I can be so bold as to boil down what I'm reading, the chief complaint is something on the lines of: we haven't adequately set up and stated how we will observe or track troublesome players, in a way that lets us deal with them effectively, while also respecting the privacy of our non-troublesome players. (If I've somehow missed another major point, let me know.)

I hear and get the concerns. @Auspice - I agree with you that there needs to be a reasonable expectation of privacy, and we do want that to be established as part of our setup for also dealing with the troublesome sorts that we know will eventually rear their heads at us. Thank you (and @sunny too) for bringing this up, and advocating for it, it's the type of constructive feedback I was hoping to hear.

There have been good suggestions put forward (things like Suspect and Rhost, as well as having a clear setup for tracking/logging complaints). I'll admit to being a bit rusty on my PennMush, so I'll need to do the legwork on all of that. I will. I don't want to guess at the final solution right now, but know that I'm working on it and will report back.

@Pyrephox - thank you for posting this! I've thought a lot about this sort of thing as I work on my game design and community, but without the formal training or structure to the thoughts that you've brought to the table.

One point in particular that jumps out at me:

IC titles/powers/abilities are often viewed as rewards, not necessarily as tools - you will have people compete viciously for them who have no intent of using them; the GAINING of the reward is the point.

This is SO true. Seen it time and again. So, question for the whole group... how, as a game designer, does one set those sorts of things up to be tools, encouraging their use by the people who have them? Has anyone seen a game that does this well?

@bear_necessities
Thanks - good luck to you too!

And everyone - I had a feeling you'd understand.

@Watcher said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

**Long distance to YodaGuest: M----- has no alt. "But nice try."
YodaGuest pages: Your login is within a second of your staff bit. So to you Otere. Nice try.

I am Osiris (co-owner of Firefly). So of course I know that I'm not the same person as @watcher, who paged all of this to me, and I willingly fill in the other name that our troll used for me.

Part of our troll's MO is definitely trying to point out how smart and threatening he is, by knowing who everyone is. So, he "knew" Watcher was a cheaty-alt of Osiris... and that as Osiris I'm also Otrere here (though the dude couldn't even spell it right once). He kept referring to me as Otere, or hun, throughout our conversations that day. He also namedrops on other people and their elsemu/else-social/RL identities.

**YodaGuest pages: they can't do shit, and brought this on their own game.
...
That's about when the +mail spamming started, and staff took their own steps to deal with this clown. He hasn't been seen since, and I can't say I'm sorry.

We are now blocking connections from VPNs on Firefly - Still Flyin'. Guest bits are no longer able to send +mail. So yeah, we "can't do shit." We'll have guest access open again later today.

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

There are two "axes" of pacing...

• How fast you can expect poses to come in. For some people, anything more than 10min between poses is "too slow", whereas others might still consider 1-pose-an-hour to be "live".
• How long you can expect the scene to run. Many folks can handle a same-day slow-work-RP scene but would balk at a multi-day one because it mucks with their inner sense of continuity.

I really don't want to have TWO different settings for each scene - that's too complicated.

Thinking out loud here... I totally get the complexities of trying to solve this properly (where it's largely a culture problem, and code can't fix culture).

That said, I really like @L-B-Heuschkel's suggestion of a "live" and "asynchronous" distinction. What if that was automatically displayed based on the average pose speed, with the admins choosing the tipping point as a configuration setting? (Admins could also choose to shut this off and not use it on their game.)

I hear you that average speed is tricky too... but a well-paced scene that suddenly dips to slower for a bit is either really turning into an asynchronous scene, or it's a bogus lull (everyone went to get dinner) and will self-correct when people come back.

Then, I do see value in some way of sharing whether a scene is expected to stretch for more than a day or not. Could there be a checkbox that players tick when creating a scene, to say it's expected to last more than a day? And then, if the scene does last more than a day, that box gets automatically checked for you?

This doesn't replace the Notes field, that people should use to say words about what they have in mind for the scene. It creates a quick metric to see at a glance, how a scene is running.**

Even with your two axes, we'll really only end up with three types of scenes:

• "live" - shorter average pose speed, less than a day.
• "asynch, one-day" - longer average pose speed, probably people at work or busy with RL. Maybe the pace improves when they all get home, maybe not.
• "asynch, multi-day" - yeah, we're gonna take our time with this to play it all out.

You really aren't going to see a live scene go more than 10 or 12 hours. (The game I run now, non-Ares, no portal, has live scenes that occasionally go that long... we have an active Euro/daytime crowd, and and active US/evening crowd... maybe if we also had an APAC crowd we could keep a scene rolling around the clock, but 12 hours seems to be the upper limit right now.)

** Another idea just struck me... what if instead of this being configured for the whole game, each player was able to set "how many minutes do I consider fair, before a scene is asynch instead of live?" Bob can say 15. Sue can say 120. They're shown different flags on the scenes, accordingly.

My game, Firefly - Still Flyin', has a small but active crowd, and we're glad to have newbies join in.

As an Ares game-runner, I can say: I'm aware that feature exists and I consciously chose to remove the breaks based on my personal preference.

If a player on my game spoke up about that, or any other preference on things, I'd pay attention. I might look for others agreeing, even run a quick poll, and if there was support for a change, I'd be very open to that. You might want to bring this up on your game, to get a sense of why the decision was made, and whether others would also like to see it changed.

We have just moved our Firefly game to AresMush, and we're open for new players!

Come play in the Firefly/Serenity 'Verse. Our game has a strong storytelling focus, and is very light on coded systems. Play is currently based in Eavesdown on Persephone, with the option to play on ship crews as well. Hope to see you there!

Learn more at https://firefly-stillflyin.aresmush.com/

I'm Osiris on there, and run the game with Londinium.

@Seraphim73 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

In my own experience, there’s one more type of scene:

• “Live Burst” - 1-3 hours of live play, a pause usually around 12-20 hours, and then another 1-3 hours of live play to finish it up.

Yeah, you've found the valid combo for "live, over multiple days" that I didn't come up with. Thanks!

Without a web portal and a scene that stays open for the gap, that's where the players say to each other, "let's pause and pick this up tomorrow."

With a scene system, ideally someone updates the note for the scene (if it's public) to say, "we've paused and will pick this up at <time and date>."

@faraday said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

There are two "axes" of pacing...

• How fast you can expect poses to come in. For some people, anything more than 10min between poses is "too slow", whereas others might still consider 1-pose-an-hour to be "live".
• How long you can expect the scene to run. Many folks can handle a same-day slow-work-RP scene but would balk at a multi-day one because it mucks with their inner sense of continuity.

I really don't want to have TWO different settings for each scene - that's too complicated.

Thinking out loud here... I totally get the complexities of trying to solve this properly (where it's largely a culture problem, and code can't fix culture).

That said, I really like @L-B-Heuschkel's suggestion of a "live" and "asynchronous" distinction. What if that was automatically displayed based on the average pose speed, with the admins choosing the tipping point as a configuration setting? (Admins could also choose to shut this off and not use it on their game.)

I hear you that average speed is tricky too... but a well-paced scene that suddenly dips to slower for a bit is either really turning into an asynchronous scene, or it's a bogus lull (everyone went to get dinner) and will self-correct when people come back.

Then, I do see value in some way of sharing whether a scene is expected to stretch for more than a day or not. Could there be a checkbox that players tick when creating a scene, to say it's expected to last more than a day? And then, if the scene does last more than a day, that box gets automatically checked for you?

This doesn't replace the Notes field, that people should use to say words about what they have in mind for the scene. It creates a quick metric to see at a glance, how a scene is running.**

Even with your two axes, we'll really only end up with three types of scenes:

• "live" - shorter average pose speed, less than a day.
• "asynch, one-day" - longer average pose speed, probably people at work or busy with RL. Maybe the pace improves when they all get home, maybe not.
• "asynch, multi-day" - yeah, we're gonna take our time with this to play it all out.

You really aren't going to see a live scene go more than 10 or 12 hours. (The game I run now, non-Ares, no portal, has live scenes that occasionally go that long... we have an active Euro/daytime crowd, and and active US/evening crowd... maybe if we also had an APAC crowd we could keep a scene rolling around the clock, but 12 hours seems to be the upper limit right now.)

** Another idea just struck me... what if instead of this being configured for the whole game, each player was able to set "how many minutes do I consider fair, before a scene is asynch instead of live?" Bob can say 15. Sue can say 120. They're shown different flags on the scenes, accordingly.

@Pyrephox - thank you for posting this! I've thought a lot about this sort of thing as I work on my game design and community, but without the formal training or structure to the thoughts that you've brought to the table.

One point in particular that jumps out at me:

IC titles/powers/abilities are often viewed as rewards, not necessarily as tools - you will have people compete viciously for them who have no intent of using them; the GAINING of the reward is the point.

This is SO true. Seen it time and again. So, question for the whole group... how, as a game designer, does one set those sorts of things up to be tools, encouraging their use by the people who have them? Has anyone seen a game that does this well?

M*A*S*H

@Jennkryst said in Why no Star Trek games?:

Obvious answer is because I will jump in on any ads demanding they add spaceflight and scare off staff.

I remember you trying this when I brought up Firefly, and we're Still Flyin' (without coded space flight at the moment).

There are definitely challenges that come up with any space/crew-based game.

Okay to join in on this, as a game-runner? I'd love to have more folks on Firefly - Still Flyin'.

Not only am I an admin, I'm playing regularly. We've got a small but good group there already (and it's growing).

The Eavesdown Clinic is an active org. We have a few criminal types, a few Alliance types, and assorted others. People who play in the US afternoons/Euro evenings, and in the US evenings.

There's been some talk of getting a ship crew together. It hasn't quite coalesced yet, but there's interest.

The game's about story, not about running code. Come check us out if this sounds appealing!

http://firefly-mush.wikidot.com/

Firefly - Still Flyin' is open again, and welcomes new guests and characters!

As many of you saw, we had some recent trouble. @browncoat (Londinium) and I (Osiris) really appreciate the show of support that came about from that unpleasant situation. As was said over on that thread - I'm really glad to see games start to work together to block harassment, for the good of the hobby. We want our game (like any, I'm sure) to be fun and welcoming, and we will do what is necessary to keep it that way. So... troublemakers not welcome. Everyone else, please come check us out!