Best posts made by Salty Secrets

@SunnyJ covered most of it. The most important advice I can give you is that you can't please everyone. No one has ever been able to, no one is currently able to, and no one will ever be able to. Therefore, whatever you do, it's important to keep to your vision and to your target audience. Don't try to needlessly widen the game's scope to appeal to every genre of role-player. Have an experience that's as pure to what you want to do as you can make it; if you dilute it too much, it'll do more harm than good.

It's better to bring joy to twenty-five people than to bring a so-so experience to fifty.

@Gilette Introductions in the real world are almost never like that so I don't understand why people role-play them like that.

People tend to meet when their circumstances see them doing the same task together, whether that's working, studying, drinking, playing games or otherwise, and first meetings tend to center entirely around that activity. People get to know each other a little bit as they do something together, and if they enjoy each other's company they seek to meet again either to repeat the experience or try a new one.

"Getting to know someone" doesn't happen in a single meeting like role-players seem to think. It might be an attempt to establish immediate friendships and skip the boring parts, but the resulting role-play tends to be bland and boring.

If your MUSH has 100 log-ins but only 5 role-play every other day your MUSH is basically a failure. It's pretty frequent that when a MUSH falls into this kind of fate they'll say everything is fine because they still have lots of log-ins.

Log-in count is the least useful of MUSH metrics. A MUSH with 10 players but each can have 8 characters can easily feign looking like it has 80 players when really it's just a big cluster of alts, like Multiverse MUSH.

The best metric I've found is to measure: are people active, and are people having fun.

If a good percentage of your population is active, and people are having fun, you've made a good MUSH. Nothing else matters.

@ixokai If you asked me to make a MUSH and then told me my reward when the MUSH finally opens is to not be able to apply for a character at the same time as players, potentially not even getting a chance to try out for a character I really want to play... I wouldn't make the MUSH. That's just a really bad setup.

I agree there needs to be oversight so that staff doesn't first pick all the interesting characters, but surely there's a better way to do it than that.

Are you fishing for feedback or just stating plans?

I'd recommend keeping personality for FC and eliminating it for OC.

You see, an OC's personality is in the long run pointless to have. Players of OC characters will often take turns and departures from their plans or adapt them to events and plots. Their background is on the reverse very important, as you don't want someone's OC to have done crazy things in the past. Key points and important events only. No one cares what high school your OC went to.

It is naturally the other way around for FC characters. You already know their background, what you want to know is whether the player has a good idea of what he's signing up to play. If someone applies for Vegeta you want to be sure they understand who Vegeta is, because maybe they're just after the prestigious position, and power boost, of being Vegeta. At the same time you don't want an essay. Like backgrounds for OC characters, key points and important events only. No one cares what Vegeta's favorite food is, even if it's interesting trivia.

Your best bet for a nearly complete list of currently active and populated games is to just check out Mud-Stats:

http://mudstats.com/Browse

Sort the games by number of players, make sure online status is set to UP, set a world-type if you only want a certain type of database, and the first several pages of results should be accurate. Not fully complete by any stretch, but it's easier to use Mud-Stats to build your list and then ask people for games that aren't on Mud-Stats.

Here's a suggestion for how to handle keeping the list up to date: instead of a file downloaded and included with the client, have the list of games hosted on your own website and accessed through the BeipMU client. Add a "send report" button either next to each world or at the top of the list, allowing users to send feedback if a world in the list is dead, or if they want to add their world to the list because it isn't in it already. If necessary install a security check so people don't spam the report function and make your lives unpleasant.

That way, even if someone doesn't update BeipMU for a long stretch of time, the list of worlds will always be up to date. Since BeipMU isn't a program you'd use without an internet connection, the list being online doesn't disrupt anything, and being something you can store as plain-text, it won't eat people's data either.

@Tempest That's not active, that's just populated. MUSH population isn't an indicator of MUSH activity.

Activity is better measured in terms of "if I ask for role-play can I find role-play". That's a lot harder to compile a list for since it needs first-hand accounts from multiple sources to confirm.

If you want a list of games by population there's always the mudstats directory.

@gilette No, @ThatGuyThere is right, that sort of stuff does happen in the real world too. That doesn't make it right, but it does happen.

Student bodies and clubs are the best example I can think of, as by their nature they'll rotate membership every three to five years as people join and then graduate. The identity and purpose of any given group of students can change entirely based on the agenda of new students joining.

Back when I was still in college, I joined the "Japan Appreciation" committee/group/hangout/student body, whatever you want to call it. It was basically a private room with a TV and a huge library of anime and manga on shelves. When I joined, it was still true to its roots. There were only about twenty of us, so between classes maybe only four or five would ever be in the room at the same time.

One year before I graduated, freshmen showed up with a Nintendo 64 and asked if they could use the room to play Smash Bros when we weren't watching anime. They paid their membership fee and all so we didn't see a problem with it, so long as it didn't disturb the people who came to watch anime or read manga in peace.

Over the next few months, those freshmen lured in more and more of their friends and would spend increasingly alarming amounts of time playing the game. The ones in charge, like me, were too busy with graduation projects to settle disputes and through our neglect the anime and manga club became the Smash Bros club, unofficially. Old members left over it, new ones looking to play the game came in droves.

By the time I'd graduated, one of the freshmen had become head of the club due to there not being anyone else with the drive to do anything left, and policies changed drastically to put a bigger focus on gaming than the club's original purpose.

If they'd followed proper procedure, they would've made their own group/club by going through the school's administration. With their own room and TV they wouldn't have had to disrupt another group. But: the application process for getting a new student group approved and funded was notoriously harsh at the time, not to mention unfriendly to people who just wanted to play video games while at school. It was easier for them to invade the one club that already had a TV.

@tnp Party hosts do get to eat at the same time as guests though.

And staff should get to pick FC at the same time as players.

Your equivalency is false, you talk of an example where staff would have selected their FC and closed them before the game even opened. As long as it's done at the same time players can, with the same application process, where's the injustice?

Staff signed up for months of work before opening and possibly years of work after opening to keep everyone happy, free of charge, at the expense of significant chunks of their free time, what's the harm letting them pick characters at the same time as everyone else?

I'm deleting my entire reply because I came up with a better one.

What if instead of a MU Wiki we had a MU review site.

We could call it Rotten ToMUtoes.

Enforced positivity has to be one of the worst concepts I've ever run across, both in mushing and in real life, to address and comment on something said a few posts back.

No good can come from making people store their real feelings away. You either end up with an oppressive atmosphere where everyone is smiling and it just feels wrong, as was described, or you end up with people frequently bursting open when their emotional containers are full. Since everyone has a different-sized bottle, the larger the user-base the more likely you are to see one of those explosions daily and chain-reactions can be devastating.

... but that's not to say that everyone always saying exactly what they think is good, either. Many read the authorization to be honest as the authorization to be an asshole.

I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.

In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.

@ping Coder advice, if you don't know what to do about a file type and what should and shouldn't be in a file, make the file plain-text, only include the information you'll need in it, and handle formatting and prettying in the GUI or program itself.

If you end up incorporating more fields in a later version of the file, just host a second copy of it and leave the old one for people still using the old client. Plain-text files are small, won't clog your bandwidth or storage space up, and reading from them is painless in most languages.

I understand if you'd still rather have a file people have to update, just thought the suggestion was worth a shot. The advice to use Mud-Stats stays though.

@Thenomain I think any such system that doesn't take into account whether Player A put any effort into his lie at all is doomed to failure. Failure might be a strong word, actually, let's say doomed to be the same as all other social systems.

If social combat is to exist in a player versus player environment, there needs to be a third party who can impartially judge the situation and say things like "Player A, your lie is poorly constructed so you get -5 to your roll" or something along those lines.

There has to be a line that social stats can't cross. In order for a social roll to succeed what you use it to propose should at the very least be possible and reasonable. No amount of social stats should swerve an astronaut into becoming a Flat Earther.

@tnp From where I'm standing most of those make complete sense.

Let's look at Magneto and Professor X first. These guys are so incredibly powerful and important that whenever they do come out, they make the story about their involvement. You can't have them side-lined without asking them to limit their involvement in role-play. Sure, you could ask Xavier to stick to school role-play, and Magneto to stick to politics, but that's no fun for their player. Having them casually out and about on random missions doesn't make much sense, either.

And that logic applies to a great many others on the Banned list too.

The other category they already talked about in this thread is neutral characters like Deadpool, Jugger or Grrtooth, and characters who lead their own individual factions, like Shaw. Since the conflict is meant to be about the X-Men and the Brotherhood it'd make sense to keep those characters off-limits for now.

I'd ban Deadpool if I was running an X-Men game too, anyway: the kinds of players who are attracted to playing him don't tend to know how to control themselves.

Which of the decisions are puzzling you besides those?

@Arkandel This is generally my viewpoint on it as well, and why I cannot stand when people compare "I expect you to play a good liar" with "I expect you to know how to cook meth".

Cooking meth would in most role-play I've ever been a part of be handled by saying, "My character cooks meth." and then rolling. The same goes with hacking, cooking, hunting and sometimes even combat with a simple "I swing my sword" or "I fire my shotgun". You can also google most practical skills like that and make a convincing pose if you had to.

Lying, impressing, manipulating people is on the other hand almost always role-played out fully and responses to it must be role-played out fully as well.

Unless you know of a game where people can say "I lie to you" and then roll without explaining anything, comparing these two things is trying to compare apples and oranges.

I think the proposed changes are pretty good. Keeping ad threads cleaner and making a more obvious divide between constructive reviews and throwing mud seems like the way to go to solve a number of issues that keep coming up.

For the rest, though? I think it's fine as it is.

While some people like @Paris don't seem to want to accept it, the bottom line is this: if this place shut down, someone would make a new one. If that one shut down, someone else would make a new one. If that new place shut down, you get the idea. This isn't up for debate, we've seen it happen already.

People need an outlet to voice their frustrations with the hobby, warranted or not. There'll always be abusive admins, abusive players, and this place existing doesn't change that. If they weren't being disruptive here, they'd be disruptive somewhere else. The behaviors that make this place "undesirable" are behaviors you'd continue seeing even if we closed shop. You'd see it on whatever new forums were made to bitch and on the games themselves. You'd see it in Livejournal communities like Bad_RPers_Suck. Maybe someone'd create /r/WORA.

I'd rather people be assholes here than on the games/at the players they're being assholes about. You can ignore this place, but you can't ignore a MUSH you play on without making the decision not to play on it. In fact I'd say a majority of players in the hobby do a very good job of ignoring - or not knowing - this place even exists. Because we don't advertise. Because the hog pit requires signing up for rather unintuitively, and someone who found this place by accident wouldn't know to look for it.

If you can see the hog pit - the toxic part of this place - you made a conscious choice to see it. If you don't like what you see, you can leave the hog pit group and never have to care again. If someone keeps nagging you, your staff, your players, on public or private channels, to "check out what these jerks are saying about a player/a game" you can tell them to stop bringing it up. Being obsessed about what people say here, if you don't like it, isn't healthy, so here's a novel idea: just stop looking at it.

MSB is the vocal minority in every sense of the word. Better everything that it entails be happening here than elsewhere.

I'm wary of supporting positive reviews remaining in the ad threads if negative ones are being put elsewhere, especially with the risk the negative reviews could be hidden behind the membership wall of the Hog Pit. It might be easy to join but it isn't something a new member will know to seek out unless someone held their hand into discovering it.

I think keeping the ad threads for Q&A as well as for linking to revelant threads, whether in this subforum or the Hog Pit, is the correct course of action to avoid bias.