I never disliked VASpider as a player, we only had very poor interaction in a staff capacity.
But I know other people's experiences vary wildly. I wouldn't personally mind playing with her again outside a position of power.
edit: Ironically some of my best Reach RP was with her.
@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
And yet, in the complaints of using telnet, I don't recall anyone really explaining how we are going to get out of this cycle.
I have a long-term plan, but I don't like talking out of my ass until I know something is feasible.
@Ganymede I don't think I understand. You mean geared towards preventing people from being bored rather than enabling people to just go out and do shit?
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.
@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.
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.
@Paris Mostly because, while this is definitely a terrible thing to happen, it's an incredibly exceptional case. It's kind of like not going outside because lightning might strike you dead.
The only explanation I can come up with for why this seems to be a problem I've only seen mentioned here and on WORA, is that I'm guessing at some point WoD games used to do emails and a bunch of predictably batshit crazy stuff happened.
Hell, I've used my email on games with batshit crazy staff when I was younger and didn't know any better, who I pissed off, and I still didn't even get so much as a peep by email. A lot of big games use email for apps and it's just considered totally normal in a lot of places, while some places don't use email because they've moved to fully coded chargen apps. In my opinion it mostly comes down to personal preference.
I will say that when I started back in 2005, I could have definitely imagined it being a higher possibility that people might abuse email and such, even though I never saw or heard of it happening outside of these forums, but like, we're such a different hobby now that it wouldn't even close to be my first concern.
While I'm not saying that you can't have a preference for not giving out or just having an extra email that you use for unimportant shit, the strong resistance to simply giving an email is still one that's very strange to me. It's one that I've literally only encountered here and WORA, like, even outside of the hobby it's not a thing I've really heard before. I've heard of having separate emails for different levels of importance for things (IE: A porn email, a business email, a general personal email, etc, which is what I do), but like... the super strong resistance to having to give an email out at all, which is one of the most super standard things on the entire internet, is really, really weird to me.
Maybe it's a generational thing that I just don't get. Sure, there's a ridiculously unlikely chance that your email could get mishandled because the headwiz is a moron (re: The Linkedin thing, who uses a personal email for handling apps? That's fucking ridiculous), but it's such an infinitely mild inconvenience, on top of being an unlikely one, that the fact that it's even being debated seems like having a strong opinion about M&M colors or something.
Of course no one uses their business email to sign up to MUs, or literally anything else on the internet, because it's a business email (if you're using your business email to sign up to random shit on the internet but have a strong opinion about MUs, I don't know what to tell you), but since when is it controversial or even unlikely that people have alternate emails to use for unimportant shit? Obviously normies don't, because they don't know wtf they're doing at any given time, but they're generally not the sorts of people who take up RPing, let alone MUing, and are half the reason phishing exists.
How does literally anyone survive on the internet, even outside of the hobby, with one email address? And not just a burner email, but like, if you don't have two or three permanent email addresses, that's kind of a problem.
Having only one email is a security concern that I'd address before even considering the mild inconvenience of giving an unimportant one out to a MU.
Incidentally, I actually give out my casual shit email to MUs, which is actually the second oldest active one I have (I got it when you still needed to invite people to Gmail). It's not my business email, porn one, or any of my branding ones, it's just for random casual shit. I have yet to receive any spam from a MU on it since 2005 when I got into the hobby and first had to use email in it, and I'm certainly not going to get scared away by wildly exceptional but still incredibly mild cases.
I've been on probably dozens of games that require email, due to it being a general norm in some areas of the hobby. I've never really seen anything bad come out of it. Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.
@deadculture Jesus Christ.
I'm out. If we hit WORA vibes any harder, Cirno's gonna come back, more stoned than ever.
@deadculture said in Fading Suns 2017:
@bored Yeah, to be absolutely fair, Paulus could tell a terrific story when he wanted to. He had a good sense of plotline pacing and maybe the control freak in him was actually good in turning out those into an organic progression.
Assuming it wasn't one of the stories that were submitted to Paulus for approval and then Paulus just straight up stole the story and took credit after rejecting them.
But I'm guessing anyone who has a problem with that is an entitled special snowflake.
My current personal preference in MUing is to try to get a feel for staff before I even app a character, and look for red flags. Since I started doing that, I've had a significantly better time as far as not wasting my time in a place where everyone suddenly pulls off their masks and reveals a deep layer of shittiness.
I do this specifically because I used to have a lot of trouble trusting staff, and used to do the opposite (avoid them). It was a bit counterproductive. But it helps that I no longer play games where staff consider themselves lords on high above their entire playerbase, who make themselves unavailable.
@Thenomain My experiences with VASpider were all good until I learned she was secretly trying to kill me on her staff alt.
@bored Uhh I'm saying the exact opposite of that. That games where people are absolutely horrible and toxic are the minority, and the belief that it's the norm is ridiculous.
@Lithium I feel like it's kind of bleak to feel as if the bare minimum you can hope for is to just "make it work". Like damn, imagine if we applied the same standards to food.
@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:
That's the reaity of the world, man. Even the supernaturals have limits. So 'impact on the world' is ... kind of confusing to me. What sorts of impacts are you looking to make? And more importantly, are they actually feasible with the resources that you have? That's the big question, there. While you might want to do something world-spanningly epic, your actual ability to do so isn't much less of a pipe dream for your average archmage than it is for your average city politician. That's just the breaks. Scale is a thing.
It's honestly very difficult to really put this in words, but it's not really a matter of "Alright my e-peen is the biggest and now the world knows", what I'm saying is something simple like just feeling as if you're a part of the world, even if there's not necessarily a metaplot. MCM sure as hell only has something resembling a metaplot like every two years or so, and I at least personally felt like a part of the world (at the time I played), despite the massive amount of players.
When it comes to impacting the world, I should clarify that I don't mean the world as in Earth, I mean the world as in the world immediately around you. Having your actions in general, like, matter. In a game like Reach (I'm saying Reach because I actually played that, unlike Fallcoast) you could have presumably gone and stabbed Cthulhu and half the game probably wouldn't even know it. It's not really a matter of what you can do, or the scope of what you do, it's a matter of the world feeling connected, cohesive, and alive, not like every sphere is an entirely different MU.
I'm not going to say that this is what everyone wants, or that even if it was possible to even make that happen in Fallcoast, that it would even be something that the playerbase wants (they're enjoying themselves just fine, if the numbers are any indication). My post was simply to illustrate why Fallcoast has high numbers vs. a game that hits more of the notes that I consider to be more quality focused rather than quantity of things to access.
Windy City, despite all its problems, hit a lot of the notes I'm talking about. You generally felt like the world was cohesive, that all of these spheres existed in the same place. Even if people had cliques, those cliques were still in the same world as you, that's how it felt. It didn't feel like there were lots of walls in between everything. Though I should note, again, that this is mostly me talking about Fallcoast in the context of being anything like Reach, so this is mostly me assuming based on conjecture due to how much time I spent on Reach and how people say that Fallcoast is similar.
Like, I'm by no means saying Windy City was a great game, just that it successfully felt like a single world and even minor shit mattered if it made sense for it to matter. It's difficult for anything to feel like it matters in sandbox-ish games, and when things don't really matter because you know that you're in basically a shiny sandbox, then I find it difficult to invest. A lot of people enjoy getting to do whatever they want and be as uber powerful as possible despite the fact that it actually doesn't matter and not much had to actually be done to achieve that, but literally the bare minimum that I want out of a world is to feel as if I exist in it.
This is not something that every game is capable of addressing, nor should they even feel obligated to address it, because not everyone has those needs, and despite my language of one thing being higher quality than the other, this is ultimately my subjective opinion. HeroMUX (I think that's the right one, I've played so many of these damned things that they run together sometimes) was similar in that I got bored and left because nothing really mattered. Characters could get retconned and rebooted and history suddenly didn't matter anymore, big plots could happen but they didn't feel important because, again, it just didn't matter and the world didn't really feel like it was a living world so much as people just doing stuff.
And, you know, there's nothing wrong with people just doing stuff, if they're having fun, have fun, I'm not going to criticize people for what they find fun. My explanation of Fallcoast was specifically "this is what people enjoy about it". I'm not gonna login and go "Change for me", I'm like one dude. If it works, it works. Maybe my language was too harsh in my post, though, so I apologize for that.
@deadculture If the implication is that "anywhere fun" = "a culture of player toxicity", then yes, I have, pretty early on, and then decided that I don't hate myself.
Funny how that works.
I guess it's my millennial entitlement.
edit: Sorry, there are 246 games in my current world folder since I switched to MUSHClient (meaning there are a bunch of games I don't have a record of), so I guess I was being modest.
This is not a knock on Fall Coast, because I haven't played it and I like some of the people who I (presume) run it.
However, if it's anything like Reach, then it has high connection numbers for the same reason that people actually eat at Old Country Buffet despite there being better options at a similar price.
For the price of one really decent high quality meal at other restaurants, you can get a huge variety of stuff that doesn't necessarily go together and probably not a huge amount of care goes into making sure that it goes well with anything else anyway, the food isn't really presented particularly well, or at all, it's just kind of put out there for you to eat. And you can put ice cream on your fried chicken if you damned well please, though as a black person I find the idea of eating fried chicken at Old Country Buffet to be appalling on multiple levels, not to be a racial stereotype here (eat chicken at Popeyes or a Chinese takeout place like a decent person, if you must get cheap fried chicken).
Sure, people could go somewhere nice, where the walls are fancy, the people are polite, and they pushed all us brown people out of the neighborhood so that we won't make anyone uncomfortable. But you know, why do all of that when you can indulge in wasteful human decadence for the same price, and no one's going to stop you from going made with the power of making a dry pizza slice and mediocre steak sandwich (with funnel cake as the bread).
This is why games like that have 100+ connections.
If you cast a ridiculously wide net and appeal to a huge demographic at the detriment of overall quality and focus, then yes, you can get a ton of players. If getting a ton of players is your goal, that's the easiest way to do it. There are other ways to do it, but that's the easy one.
Though I should repeat that this isn't a knock at Fall Coast and the people who run it, it's mostly just what I see as an honest observation. I feel like this is not something that they're unaware of, it doesn't make them bad people, they should do what they feel like doing and enjoy that.
My personal belief, because I came into MUing at around 2005, is that 30-40 unique players is ideal. Larger games can work with proper planning, but in a lot of large games you get lost in a sea of noise and don't truly feel like a part of a world. MCM is probably the largest game I played while feeling like I was a part of its world. Early Reach also made me feel like I was a part of it, but that went out the window after a while.
RPI MUDs are shockingly significantly at this than MUSHes and such.
@bored I've been on 100+ games and I can assure you that this behavior is the minority, being decent and not a literal monster is not some unique special snowflake thing.
There's always at least one or two shitty players, but for most of a game being that way? Yeah, no.
If it bothers you that toxic behavior isn't the norm, then I don't know what to tell you.
I do, however, find your exaggerated pessimistic outlook on human behavior to be rather depressing, so I'm gonna eject.