Best posts made by Rook

I find it amusing that within three minutes, your resolve has collapsed and you have outed your source.

"Shamefur dispray!"

@Faraday
Shhhh. You've exposed my attempt to bring us back full circle and use the Socratic method to help answer his questions!

Yeah, I know, @Arkandel. My job is actually helping ITs in companies mature their organization into automation taking over menial IT tasks. It's what I do, so yeah, right there with you. I see things starting in that direction, but I think that lots of things will have a LONG way to go to be automated.

I think @Thenomain and I were more having a commentary on the state of interactions, socially. Lots of different things coming up that have been there for years, but with social media accelerating and changing the national/world conversation, it is like the natural development and adoption rate is not only speeding up... it is having the natural bumps and challenges that one might imagine with a sped-up adoption rate.

They say that it takes at least a generation for an idea to be absorbed into social norms. That rate is changing into sometimes a decade or less. I think society (especially older society or the non-digitally-integrated) is having trouble 'speeding up' to that pace. It was one of my points, somewhere in this sub-thread discussion, that I think that slowing down the conversation every now and then... simply with some listening... is something we could all do well with.

@Arkandel
When the system is geared, written, and balanced entirely around the concept of a small tight-knit and very inter-supportive group of PCs. When that concept of an RPG is taken into a multiplayer arena of every-character-for-themselves, it fails horribly and dramatically.

Dear @tragedyjones,

We are currently considering your recent request for eHarem funding. Your offer of 6% ownership of said eHarem is within our guidelines set forth.

In the interests of oversight and governance, @tragedyjones, we require weekly progress reports. These will be submitted as graphs of eHarem current growth and projections on both eHarem applications and quality assurance. In addition, we require a review of your eHarem financials, including an audit by a substantiated third-party firm. You have your choice of the one firm in our employ.

Our committee will contact you once a decision on your funding application has been made.

A plea: please add to your export options a JSON option. XML is dying (in the eyes of most) and JSON is seeming to be the new standard. It is much more consumable by, for instance, web services.

A few Nice-To-Haves that most game builders will want:

• Report on completeness of Rooms and Exits.
  • Configurable attributes to check for (osucc, odrop, desc, flags, etc)
  • Badge/flag rooms with certain Flags set (such as unapproved flags)
• Configurable to use different server codebase (MUX, Penn, Rhost, at minimum)
• While doing the above, you might consider making the commands ran very configurable.

@Arkandel said in State of Things:

Is the 'blue code' a real thing in your opinion? Do cops back illegal actions taken by their peers to the point of committing perjury or hiding/modifying evidence?

I want to point something out here. This 'code' that is being asked about is not just a 'blue' code, as @Derp says. There is a 'white' code (for doctors backing each other up on bad calls so that colleagues don't get sued), there is an 'IT' code that I've seen over and over and over, not just in one organization, but almost every one that I've worked directly with. Many of which are Fortune 100 companies. I know for a fact that there is a code amongst Accounting/Finance teams, Management and HR teams, the list goes on.

People instinctively circle the wagons around a comrade that they feel is going to be unjustly prosecuted for a "small thing", but the problem is that, over time, these wagon-circling parties start grating on the sense of right and wrong. Those involved start justifying two things: 1) that they have to defend themselves to do their jobs right, 2) the other people are just 'out to get them'. Right or wrong, just look around and you'll see proof of this where you work, where you go to school. Fuck, it's a core trope in TV Dramas.

Over large spans of time, a person's morals change, out of group and personal preservation. Not initially out of a sense of 'fuck them', but there is a lot of that in there.

I have come to this one conclusion about racism (from this one angle) from knowing a lot of police. Police officers of both sexes, of at least six races, and all of the ones that I'm thinking of are very against the habitual criminals. I don't call them racist, because these same individuals respect upstanding citizens, they segment them differently than they do the criminal element, the ones that they've booked and jailed time and time again. That is something that compounds the problem is personal experience with some of the perpetrators of the crimes that they are investigating and/or called to. Each one of these racially diverse cops uses the 'N' word, and what might surprise you is that it isn't just against the black segment of their 'clientele'. The word (at least amongst that very small segment that I know) is applied to anyone who is (heavily simplified) hell-bent on a life of crime because they don't want to pursue any other life.

Is it right? No. Is it real? Yes. At least in my visible sliver of the 'world'.

What is it that NewMU* games (Ares and Evennia, we just need a new 'word' to encompass these things to differentiates them from MUSH/MUX/Telnet-based games) are going to bring to the table?

When I logged into either one of these, I am still presented with text-only scrolling output. From what I have seen, they are still done in a command>output interaction.

What are the plans to completely change the interaction motif, the UX and style of these games?

#FuckPBs

People who schedule 1.5 hour meetings to get your help on something, and then show up late and unprepared.

@Pyrephox That's it! That's what we'll call it.

IDPOMY.

This is all true. Every bit of it. No, I'm not being sarcastic. You can see the experience in these posts, so for those reading and not understanding, re-read and ask questions.

I am in the same boat as the OP, left the genre about a decade ago due to angst and woe, and never really looked back until recently when daytime work boredom makes me want to find a place to contribute to again on a casual player level. Now, however, the whole slew of options is compounded by there being ten different 'versions' of WoD to know and understand, with Old and New being entirely different.

Plus, I'm not a min-maxer, so conversations about such immediately shut my brain off, or turn it to a station of nothing but white noise, and I tune out.

A status...

Done:

• Standard +who/who/+where/+finger/+profile info.
• Standard +summon/+join and +ic/+ooc commands.
• +watch system.
• Wildcard searchable +HELP and +INFO (news).
• +Build code for Architects @group, allowing for building without bits.
• Comsys and mail wrappers for comfort levels of MUX and Penn enthusiasts.
• @groups is mostly done, might be adding features to that over time.
• I've built the basics of the threaded BBoard code and it's up. I'm adding features like polls and between other coding projects.

In progress:

• Right now building +view features.
• The RPG forum is up and going as a parallel thread, and we are brainstorming design there.
• In the midst of all this, Alice and I are building out +rent-able buildings, deciding how we are going to automate all of that while maintaining all of Alice's creative ideas. (+rent, +directory, +keys, some of +map)
• We've recently had Morin join the team and start pitching in RPG design ideas as well.
• Still seeing/hoping if Kaedin will make it back from the Work blackhole he got sucked into (client travel).

On the docket, code-wise, is:

• CharGen, once the RPG solidifies. This includes +sheet, +roll, etc. Shouldn't take long.
• Possible economy system, allowing players to +buy things and add to their IC inventory for use in scenes.

I agree, cheaters will cheat, and it will be a small amount of your population, no matter how big your game is. I guess I've always fallen to the same conclusion: no matter what you're trying to stop with alt-check regimens, someone will get around it.

I just don't feel it's worth the effort, myself, to police it. If I have to investigate cheating, I won't limit myself to a list of alts. I'll investigate from a behavioral pattern angle. I already code @logging into most every IC-related command (+roll, any money systems, econ, +vote/+xp) so that you can pretty much check for cheating if and when it gets brought up, in my opinion.

With people's love for fucking #hashtags, I cannot believe that this idea has not made it into the MU* world in a profitable and positive manner. WTF? This is a perfect application.

+event Mouse Races
Saturday night, the Rose Committee will be holding a charity event to further community understanding of Sunburn Awareness. At this event, there will be speakers, open bar, dinner options and several side attractions including a ring toss, mouse races, apple bobbing and a dunk tank. Bring your dollars to support!

Rating: R (Violence, Sexual Content)
Tags: #Vampire #Werewolf #VictimChosenFromCrowd #Mutiliation #MouseRacing

This could be a thing.

Also: FuckYerHashtag.

I haven't read the material.io design manifesto, but it's a design manifesto, so as far as I think that it'd be applicable to a MU... well, it's essentially a design document.

I think it would most evidently be applied in the clarity of the grid, the rooms, the help files and so on. I think most games strive for this by having Room Parents to enforce coherent and cohesive theme, and they standardize all code output to have lines and so on. This is pretty common.

I am anal as a coder, and so when I build out a game, I have a structured document that I upload to build out the first 100 objects so that anything with a dbref of #100 or less is a game-owned object, usually OOC grid and Master Room objects.

Oh, and I guess that my ansi color schemes, while the player can recolor the entire game's primary and secondary colors with preferences on themselves, are very MD in that they are 'flat'?

I used to feel very strongly about staffing and how things were done, until I found myself on the dirty end of the WORA stick. I thought that I handled the situation the best I could, with the information I had at the time, and I got smeared hard.

But this event led me to mature in the thinking of how I dealt with other staff. I realized that communication is a huge deal, and in hindsight, with better communication, I found myself thinking that yeah, I could have handled things better. I was young, didn't know how to communicate well enough, but (I said to myself) at least my downfall wasn't prejudiced decision. That constitutes a large portion of what I have found wrong with "crap staff" in my MU time. Staffers who made decisions based on personal gain, friend favoritism, and so on. Being denied a PC slot, only to watch someone with a worse app than mine get it, and find out later that said applicant was a friend of the staffer in question. That type of shit.

I find now that I give the benefit of the doubt, having seen behind that staffing curtain once or ten times. But patterns, patterns are what make it an easy decision for me. Seeing a staff make repeatedly similar decisions over a period of time is a killer, something I cannot look past.

Then again, I rarely have to interact with staff anyway. The second edge of this sword is that I used to run a LOT of plots on games. I'd plan and include all sorts of people, do all sorts of drop-in scenes and so forth... now I don't. I found that bad staffers absolutely killed my drive to contribute for them, make content for them, only to have them stomp on it for their own personal reasons.

@HelloProject is right. I will say that this very perspective (or lack thereof) is what convinced me that pursuit of my non-WoD game was pointless. I mean, musoapbox is a good resource, there are very good people here... but it seems that WoD conversation gets orders of magnitude more attention than non.

I thought I was alone in that feeling.

Well, I've been on the receiving end of the WORA ire when I myself booted a player from our game a decade ago, for repeated offenses. I was roasted on here for being overbearing and not following our own 3-strike policies, because I just decided that enough was enough. Trying to raise up a group of players against the game was enough, in my opinion, to show someone the door.

So be careful. WORA didn't like when players were the first to come on and start roasting a game for mistreatment by staff. Once roasted, I couldn't seem to defend myself. So there is definitely a culture of CYA in MU*dom, as a Staffer. People don't want to earn their game the reputation of having knee-jerk reactionists as staffers, people who overreact, jump the gun, or any number of other cliche phrases you want to toss out there.

With that said, I'd do it again today and not give a shit what this board thought, if I truly felt that I was protecting my MU*.