My personal feeling is that there's such a low amount of people who give a shit about using their email in a MU, that it's kind of an insignificant concern. This isn't to say that their concerns aren't valid, it's mostly that I don't really see why a game should go out of its way to address what is kind of a very niche issue.
@faraday It's possible.
At the very least, I think email apps are a hell of a lot of work, so when I make my MU I plan to have a chargen anyway. I do think that an email is very useful for identity verification if people lose their password (especially if they lose it and are asking for it back on a different IP), but I'd have that be optional.
Now, not to sound dinosaur-ish, but I feel like these days effort is often not treated as the meritocracy I remembered MUing being when I first started (which, again, was only back in like 2005). This isn't to say that people who aren't running wild intricate plots can't get to do cool things, I in fact like using people who don't run plots as featured people in plots that I do, because it plays to their strengths and allows them to go out there and have fun.
But often, and something Ganymede said made me think of this, I feel like lately you don't really get back what you put into a MU, which was one of the appeals of them and what really defined my current style of doing things. Like, seeing people get to do insane shit, who are significantly less proactive than me and other people, and I'm just like, twiddling my thumbs wanting to do something super basic that I can't do.
Though I wouldn't say it's necessarily the norm, it is something that I'm encountering enough to be discouraged by it. I hear great things about that new hero game though, if only I could think of someone to app.
In my experience, in just ten years alone this hobby has almost entirely changed as far as staff conduct and what is or isn't acceptable in most games. While WoD has been slow to progress with this rest of the hobby, even those games are showing huge amounts of progress every time a new one pops up.
So I don't know about crazy remaining constant, this is a totally different hobby from when I joined, which is good because I'd have otherwise just quit by now due to being sick of all the bullshit and insane staff practices that used to be the norm.
Also I join -way- too many games to make a new email every single time. I would literally have over 200 emails if I did that from the start of my time in the hobby.
@ThatGuyThere said in Identifying Major Issues:
@Derp
Hate to break it to you but you don't have to give google a phone number to get an account. I have a gmail account and have never given them a phone number.
Google accounts without a phone number are ridiculously easy to break into, just as a heads up.
Ughhh I hate having to sound like a responsible adult, but like, I think this email argument is getting a bit circular and you guys are never going to agree (I don't care enough to include myself in the "you guys").
Also, if MUDs are included in MUs, sometimes they're a business. But that's just nitpicky on my part.
While not a problem, more of a "this would be cool", I wonder what would change about the culture if more MUs embraced IC channels (IE: channels that represent internet, radio, phone, etc). Some private, some public, representing different areas of communication. I've always enjoyed games with them. Well, some of the games I play have moved beyond simply channels and already have their own uniquely coded systems for IC communication outside of a scene itself. I find them to be very convenient and fun, when properly moderated.
I say when properly moderated for reasons that anyone who played MCM 5 years ago or M3 2 years ago should know. Everyone else should just take it as an ominous warning that you don't want unregulated public IC channels. Private ones don't need to be regulated, really.
If I recall correctly, I think Reach had a channel for IC radio shows, that was fun. But that kind of concept can be taken much further (and has been many times).
When I make my game, I think I'm gonna give scouters access to a chat system that is limited to 140 characters, because fucking hilarious.
edit:
"Omg all these dickpics!"
@surreality I played a MUD (I forgot which one, I played a lot of them) that had a psychic network. It was kind of hilarious because it was basically a psychic chatroom. I highly recommend doing this.
I definitely don't think that weird magical variants of IC channels are a bad idea,
I've heard interesting stories of African-Americans going to foreign countries and suddenly experiencing being seen as an American before being seen as a black person. It sounds like an absolutely fucking mindblowing experience, which is a part of why I want to travel soon.
@Auspice I like African-American for specifically referring to my own culture separately from other black cultures. But I like black as a casual term. So I think there's a place for both. I don't really necessarily lump myself in with British black people, or Jamaicans, or Nigerians. We're all distinctly different cultures who have our own shit going on.
But yeah, there are black people who will 100% take offense if you don't use African-American. I mean, I somewhat understand? But eh, it's whatever to me.
I've played white for most of my MUing career, mostly because it just felt like the default thing to do. I think that's the sort of mindset one gets in American culture. I recently changed that a few years ago, since I've been exploring who I am as a person and getting in touch with my "roots".
It used to just feel easier. Playing my own race frequently felt weighty, or like maybe I didn't want to be judged in my fictional fantasy roleplaying? I'm kind of over that now, but that's how I used to feel.
Tonight I was out with a white friend of mine, he treated me to Pho. But like, he kept walking up to people's houses in the middle of the night, picking plants and shit. I was like, "Dude are you nuts we shouldn't be walking up to someone's house in the middle of the night?" and he was like "Nah it's fine".
It took me a moment to remember that he has an entirely different perspective on something like that. I'm mostly thinking I don't wanna get shot by someone who thinks I'm trying to break into their house by being too close to their property >_>. Even being in that neighborhood makes me uncomfortable, so I definitely don't wanna be up too close to people's plants and shit. And he's like totally carefree about it. I can't even remotely wrap my head around what that feels like, but I can certainly pretend to for the sake of RP.
WORA and WORA's wiki were also sorta terrifying to me very early on, when I was only maybe five years into MUing or so. Being so new, you think, "Oh man I hope I don't fuck up and end up here forever".
@ThatGuyThere Uhhh no, the language is not being misused, you just legitimately have no clue how language actually works. You're setting an arbitrary standard for what is proper English based on what is essentially an entirely subjective opinion of how it should work. You're using broken ass American English like everyone else, you're not even using British English, and British English isn't even properly standardized.
Like, you do realize that we aren't French, correct? Because French is a language with government set standards, with banned words or banned usages of words, and crazy shit like that (correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been told this about French multiple times). So how exactly is someone who's speaking broken as hell modern English going to single out one minor thing that irks them about the modern form of the language that they themselves are speaking, to decide that's their hill to die on?
You're making an entirely irrational argument. We've all evolved with the language, you didn't learn proper English anymore than anyone else has. You just chose one aspect of English to decide "You know what, my language is being misused". Literally using colloquial language in every single post you're writing about people misusing the language.
Like, damn, dude. At least think about these things a little bit before you start debating people about them. Or at least stop using filthy low-born slang in every single post about people misusing English.
edit: Saying you're factually correct is also a misuse of the language, because you're not actually factually correct, due to pretty much wholesale ignoring the science of languages.
edit 2: You must really fucking hate Shakespeare.
@Salty-Secrets Yeah, I accept that there will be people who might lie on their history, though I think it's worth having the question in general. It's not so much that I want a hard list as like, just for someone to basically talk about their RP history a bit, y'know? Even if, as you said, some people might lie.
I'm still not sure that I necessarily see the merit in the personality section, since it seems more like a formality than anything else, that doesn't technically prove anything. But since the intent is to get a feel for how someone might RP a character, and if they have the personality of the character down, maybe I should bring back something M3 used to have. Basically, the sample pose. Like, entirely replace personality with a sample pose, of dialogue and action.
Rather than have someone have to think of something on the spot, I could just offer a simple writing prompt for them to respond to. Further, it'll be a non-combat writing prompt to really challenge the player's interpretation of the character.
Do you think this sounds like a good idea 0_o?
Every time I mention King Furry in this document, I think of how every MSB person who reads this document and has never seen DBZ will react.
@surreality I basically went into this project with zero intention of using XP at all. My intent was always to entirely replace XP with something else. I highly recommend reading the DICE system and seeing how what you want to do would apply to that.
Oh yeah, I definitely am making sure that I figure this shit out first. That's why I'm writing a design document and not in a MU* digging out rooms and writing files. It's also why I'm having discussions.
I like these ideas. With my four themes, there's equipment, techniques, transformations, and other things to gain.
Maybe the trick is to do a more advanced form of what MCM does, with having a baseline pool of stats that makes sense for a particular character.
Meanwhile, maybe power level can be a pool of points that aren't necessarily used like XP, but having more determines what attacks and transformations and stuff you can learn, and I guess can serve as some sort of e-peen, as is a thing that people enjoy. Power level could be this sort of thing where you can get it like a drop, like gold or something, or from doing other things. Then you start to qualify to learn things, and unlock secret transformations at certain levels, etc. The transformations and techniques could be what sets you apart as tougher, but not like, to some unstoppable degree like an EFC (I definitely remember EFCs) where you can plow through a bunch of other PCs at once.
Overall, I want to stick to villain NPCs being the toughest thing, but I don't want any one PC to be able to beat the shit out of an entire room of other PCs.
Actually, my vision of how power level could work is similar to how Super Robot Taisen used their version of cookies (I forgot what they called them). Every 100 cookies you'd unlock less common mass production units for a given faction. I would love to expand on that concept.
@Ganymede I feel like I've witnessed the frustration of no one being in a position to make executive decisions, which I feel is important for the long-term health of a game.
While I have too many projects to really take this on, my primary warning about Wikidot is to be careful with how much content you add at once to a new wiki. I've had my entire wiki get removed wholesale (which also fucked my karma), because they marked me for spam even though it wasn't. That's why I don't use Wikidot anymore, otherwise I love Wikidot.
I mean, this might also boil down to differences in how we perceive friendships and emotional attachment. I pretty regularly cut friendships or kick people right the hell out of my life because I either realize they don't respect me as a person, or that they're just really shitty or boring people from what I originally perceived, who don't contribute anything to my life.
So it's like, I have trouble imagining emotional attachment suddenly making me want to appease people or impress them. If people are inconveniencing the game then they just get removed, it doesn't matter if I liked them or whatever, it's not like I'm cutting off my own arm. This is honestly something I never understood about the way people run games. The apparent fear of upsetting people or losing relationships because you're enforcing rules or running the game in the way that you think it should be run.
If someone turns into a big ass baby because you're not doing what they want, why should you care, regardless of your previous relationship? This suggests that they're trying to use your relationship to get what they want, and also that they're a shitty ass person who should have even less sympathy than you may have had for them before.
Also, being overly friendly is creepy even if you aren't the headwiz, so that's a bit different. I also think there's a difference between being yourself and friendly and everything, and putting on your staff hat. I don't think you should do one or the other all the time.