Best posts made by surreality

@ortallus I completely agree that this should be a wakeup call for these idiots.

I hope it is.

I don't think that hope will be realized, but I hope anyway.

@Pandora I am loving that one. From the writeup, I did not have high hopes, and expected a complete trainwreck. I was very pleased to be wrong.

Re: the 'customer service model' article, I... have to admit I'm in agreement with a lot of folks here.

While I don't agree with the principle 100% myself, I have zero compunction swearing in news files and vastly prefer plain and direct language especially in policy files, so I am not likely the best example. (There are concrete reasons for that, some which stem from the idea of 'too much polite and delicate wording often dances around the point and sets up a false expectation that you can treat staff like customer service personnel -- which means 'abuse at will to a lot of people -- and it's all right to do that'. Well, it's not.)

People reasonably disagree on that, however, and different things work for different folks.

There is, however, one bit of advice in there that is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. It's this bit:

Business: I am very sorry to hear that you were treated like that by Jim, and I absolutely understand why you would be frustrated. Here is how we’re going to handle the situation: I am going to comp your meal, give you a coupon for the next time you eat with us, and we’ll be discussing the issue with Jim to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. Does that work for you?

The example of the 'explanation' behavior is fine. What's being explained? Oh, such a bad idea.

I want everyone to imagine what would happen if a staff member let an XP/spend go a day or so too long, and when a player complained about this, they were given the advance for free and a discount on their next one -- or similar.

You would have a nightmare on your hands. The chill that just crawled down your spine was dead on.

There was a really long thing I was going to write, and maybe still will at some point. It frankly got a little too depressing a fair ways in, so I needed to put it aside for a bit. (I am trying to stick to my resolution of working on my stuff until at least vacation time in late October, and trying to play some somewhere this year, and between that and a friend showing some ugly colors once again... yeah. Not right now on wall of depressing social analysis text. Sorry, or you're welcome; whichever applies.)

A lot of it boils down to the simple truth that people are flawed, and one of our main flaws is being unwilling to accept the idea that we're ever anything but perfect, reasonable, and justified in who we are and what we do at any given time. As a result, the idea of consequences typically feels unfair or the application of them feels unwarranted, even when it's not.

@Misadventure more or less nailed a lot of it else-thread.

<trudges back to the wiki code mines>

@surreality The first few episodes have been consistently good, too. Sometimes there's a decent pilot, and then it all goes to crap. They didn't fall into that trap thus far, though, so I'm pleased. Interested to see what they do with it.

They capture the cynicism of the era brilliantly, too.

@Jaunt said:

@surreality said:

Re: the 'customer service model' article, I... have to admit I'm in agreement with a lot of folks here.

While I don't agree with the principle 100% myself, I have zero compunction swearing in news files and vastly prefer plain and direct language especially in policy files, so I am not likely the best example. (There are concrete reasons for that, some which stem from the idea of 'too much polite and delicate wording often dances around the point and sets up a false expectation that you can treat staff like customer service personnel -- which means 'abuse at will to a lot of people -- and it's all right to do that'. Well, it's not.)

People reasonably disagree on that, however, and different things work for different folks.

There is, however, one bit of advice in there that is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. It's this bit:

Business: I am very sorry to hear that you were treated like that by Jim, and I absolutely understand why you would be frustrated. Here is how we’re going to handle the situation: I am going to comp your meal, give you a coupon for the next time you eat with us, and we’ll be discussing the issue with Jim to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. Does that work for you?

The example of the 'explanation' behavior is fine. What's being explained? Oh, such a bad idea.

I want everyone to imagine what would happen if a staff member let an XP/spend go a day or so too long, and when a player complained about this, they were given the advance for free and a discount on their next one -- or similar.

You would have a nightmare on your hands. The chill that just crawled down your spine was dead on.

Taking a customer service approach as an administrator does not mean giving complainers free things. It means listening to their complaints, considering their intentions and motivations, letting them know that you've heard them and understand what they are saying, and then telling them what will be done in response; sometimes, what will be done in response is going to be, "Nothing, and here's why." It doesn't mean having to compromise your policies or design decisions.

It's essentially a case of 'this was a bad example to use', since extrapolating it directly does go there. It's something a newbie admin may not realize can cause a problem if they're following the guidance there more explicitly.

People do ask for things like this, too! "Bob offended me, so I want <tangible game-related thing> as an apology!" -- which can set up a supremely bad precedent if someone doesn't think it through, which isn't always the first impulse (especially of a less experienced admin) in the midst of being screamed at.

If a game is working on a pay-for-play model, "I'm sorry that happened, we can comp you a week," may be more reasonable, but that's an important distinction and doesn't factor into game play in the same fashion.

(In part, you can also chalk my noticing this example at all up to just having written files about it being unacceptable for anyone to sling abusive crap at anyone -- including staff -- under the misconception that their job is to take abuse. That isn't actually the job of a customer service rep, either, but it's what the culture has evolved to think is acceptable behavior. It's really not, not even a little.)

That said, the article and conversations referred to in regards to customer service on OR are most definitely not a prerequisite or official stance. There is no official stance. We'd be just as happy to publish an article or engage in a conversation promoting the "players are guests in my web-space" approach that @il-volpe indicated is their approach.

The 'these are independent views not representative of the site' factor is clear enough; you don't need to stress out on that point. It's pretty much the same way here.

@duckula I read a lot about the case (and have on the trend in general since I became aware of it a few years ago). Yes, there are people like that.

The majority of them frighten me more, though: they're kids as young as 13, and they think it's going to be a harmless prank.

People are much, much more likely to do something they consider is likely to be a harmless prank -- even if this is anything but the actual reality of the situation -- than something they expect will involve a risk to life and limb.

That's why the people in denial about how dangerous this is are horrifying.

@Ganymede I am technically only 'a morning person' because I'm typically... still up by then, and it's my evening.

Admittedly, my schedule flips around and rotates slowly over weeks. Which sucks in its own right. It will conform... for a while, until it nopes the shit out of that notion and springs back to:

Working from home means 'finish task quota' a lot. I have a workaholic streak and ADD hyperfocus. These things combine very, very weirdly.

Like, the struggle is real: "Oh, hey, when did the sun go down? ...and, hey, it's back! Huh, why are my folks calling and asking if I'd like to come by for dinner because they haven't heard from me in two days and are worried I'm not eating? It's morni--oh, dinner's in fifteen minutes? Uh, yeah... food is probably a good idea... How long have I been working? Er. What's today? Oh, shit. I thought it was Tuesday."

It was so much worse when I was doing 3D stuff, too. That was dead on accurate at least twice a week rather than twice a month like it is now.

In news that should surprise precisely no one, this is also why my metabolism is spectacularly fucked. (Half the reason I lose weight on a die+t is that I set an actual timer for when to eat and make sure I do/it reminds me that my body needs something other than coffee in it.)

@Chime said:

Seriously though, it's really good coffee.

takes notes You sound like someone in need of a superauto, in all seriousness. The suffering I have endured in the month or so mine's been broken while I wait for the replacement is proving what a good investment it was/is, and that's no joke! (And I didn't even have one of the super fancypants ones, but it's still grind-per-cup godlike awesome.)

(There's a reason I've been way less pleasant than usual this month, and I blame the perpetual withdrawl migraine. )

@ortallus Re: closed registries: I wouldn't go for closed.

The kind of forced community notifications a person is moving into the area like the sex offender registry? No.

But a public national listing and something that would 100% always appear on a background check? Yes.

What they're doing has life-long consequences for their victim. It should for them, too.

I'm just going to leave this here.

http://www.cracked.com/article_26190_thereE28099s-mad-max-ballet-some-reason.html

@Chime said:

@surreality

Damn. I swear I just wasted like a whole hour drooling over espresso machines again.

I would probably go with more of the semi-auto style if I went that way, along the lines of Breville's BES920XL. But. Those brass Pavoni machines are so pretty~

I had a Saeco Talea for three solid years of heavy use that was my baby until I eventually killed it. It was a trooper. We would actually bury it in the yard if we wouldn't get fined.

"Try this."

I am so dying right now, because those words are potentially the most deadly in all of the language. It makes me cackle with sheer glee... and wonder where I can get a hold of some of the stuff to add to things when it gets this dangerously dire again!

I can see it now:

"What kind of sweetner are you adding to that coffee?"
"It isn't sweetener. It's extra caffeine."

@ortallus There are jobs around, and specific programs to incentivize hiring people are other things in Sur's Ideal Way Things Should Be.

But then, I also remember one of the video stores where I worked, where we were required to have the local sex offenders posted on the wall of the back office so they employees would be aware.

I also remember the day the man featured on one of them as a repeat offender, and rapist of girls ages 3-8, came in to rent a pile of Disney Princess movies.

The gif at this link. Or web clip, or whatever it is. (I'd imbed it, but it's a different format, and longer than average/might be a page-dragging load.)

@Jaunt said:

MUSHes are really about creating co-operative interactive fiction (through roleplay). They use soft-code to let players have the ability to do things that other games would only allow GMs to do. And so, because of that, there's less of a sense of "I created this game, I'm responsible for this game, and other people are players" and more of a sense of "I created this game so that I can play it with other people, and we're all responsible for it."

(Just addressing this bit first, 'cause there's a lot to say on each of these things and time is limited.)

From my perspective alone, this is one of those situations in which I'd say: "there are levels" and it's really a fusion of both.

First, it's generally not an "I" creating a game. This may be assumed but it's worth noting it shouldn't necessarily be. I'm doing a fairly absurd amount of work putting one together now, but I am absolutely not doing it alone. (It's also worth noting that the people who are also contributing their time and energy to the project are folks I've met here for the most part, all of whom have contributed in equally important ways, from my perspective, just for the asking and some volunteered. Others provided advice and tutorials that helped get everything started.)

This is actually pretty big, and it's something that shouldn't be discounted.

The reason I say it's a fusion of both is that, after swapping in 'staff's' for I in the first statement, it tends to be the case. I wouldn't, for instance, put this much time and energy into creating a game I had no interest playing on at some point as well.

Here's why: when it comes to world-building, to do it well, you have to love those basic building block ideas enough to give them enough meat on their bones to provide story hooks in abundance, even the ones that have no appeal to you at all.

I can offer a direct comparison here on this specific point.

The MOO @il-volpe and I both worked on many moons ago, Ghostwheel, was heavily automated. I was a builder there, which meant I could create small areas on grid with their own flock of roaming monsters and the like. I'll call it 'Zombie Swamp' for simplicity. It took about a week to create and populate the first area I put together, since it required only a basic concept to really get the point across, and some fairly decent descriptions for the places and the creatures in them to convey all the thematic elements that were required. There was stuff to do enough to keep folks busy and enjoying themselves with that. Minimal research was required, and it wasn't too tough.

The MUX I'm working on has no roaming monsters to hack away at and keep folks busy. If I was building 'Zombie Swamp' there (which I'm not, sorry to disappoint, y'all!) the things I'd need to do to keep Zombie Swamp an interesting space to play would be entirely different. More research would be involved to offer up relevant story action hooks. Different kinds of code -- ambiance emits and similar -- might be needed. More attention might need to be paid to the descriptions of the areas to give people things to improv with. More information would be needed to provide story-runners with the tools they need if they want to have a horde of zombies swoop down on the players and essentially let the players do the 'go to Zombie Swamp and kill zombies' thing that's automatic in the MOO version and requires no input from anything but the game itself to do as a solitary activity.

Essentially, I need to do different kinds of work to keep the MUX and MOO versions of Zombie Swamp interesting to players. The MOO version more or less tells its own story. The MUX version requires multiple people to tell a story in it.

Each of these approaches has its own benefits and drawbacks. The MOO version's story, to me, was considerably more limited, because attempts to tell any story other than hunting zombies there was severely impeded by constant invasions of respawning zombies. On the MUX version, people can more readily experience other stories in that space -- but they can't do so without a story-runner handy to run the zombies if they want to hunt zombies. To have anything worth doing there, they need information about the zombies if someone is willing and able to run them for others, but they also need a pile of alternate story hooks worth exploring.

One of the reasons I bring this up is perhaps not immediately obvious, but it's important: it's harder to yell at the automated code for something than it is to yell at a person. Code doesn't give a crap. A person (staff or player) running a scene is immediately accessible for yelling at or arguing with, even if the result -- a bad roll of the dice/turn of whatever randomizer is in play -- would have the same results in both scenarios.

From my perspective, the more authority one takes on, the more responsibility one takes on. Though all have some measure of responsibility, it is far from equal.

Players have the responsibility to accept the outcome of dice rolls and the rules of the game without code enforcing it automatically, thus giving them no option not to. They still don't have the option not to per the rules unless it's a consent-based game, but there's no coded 'force' applied to ensure "fair play". Players, essentially, have the responsibility to play fair, but other than 'behave like something other than a shrieking howler monkey or nasty jackass', there's not a lot more to it than that on the player level.

Story-runners, regardless of whether it's a staff member or player serving in that role, need a better grasp of the rules than the players necessarily need to have, because they are taking the place of the automated mechanics. They also have the responsibility to apply those mechanics as fairly and impartially as the code would (as much as any human can; some argue this is impossible), with no preference given to their friends and no disadvantage to others.

Staff... that's another post for another day with less data entry to do.

The primary benefits I can see in the MOO approach are that it's possible to do something as a solitary effort if one wishes, and that you don't need someone else around who knows how to run a scene involving something other than improvisational interactive fiction to do that specific thing: hunting zombies.

The primary benefits I can see in the MUX approach are that a broader range of stories can be told in the same grid space, even if it takes work to provide the hooks to allow for this. It also means the players can find creative solutions at times to problems the code hasn't taken into account, and an automated system may not provide for.

@ortallus He didn't even need to know it was a real address, in my book. He pulled a 'come fight me, I'm here'. He literally invited violence to a location, and... yeah, not knowing what it would lead to isn't much of a defense, in my book.

@RnMissionRun Again, seriously, this is not all about diet and even then it's not just sugar that's a problem.

My father has never had a cavity in his life. He has perfect teeth at 77 years old. He has no crowns, no missing teeth.

He lives on ice cream and soda, which -- while it's sometimes (about half and half) diet soda -- has acids that do substantially more harm to teeth than the sugar in soda does. (There is a reason that if you drop a corroded penny into a cup of soda, within hours it will be shiny clean like new. That isn't sugar.)

He has no problems. Never has. Motherfucker was the guy from Unbreakable until he hit 70, no joke. (Still has never broken a bone, teeth are still perfect. Needed knee replacements finally.)

I drink black coffee all day. No sugar (but high acid content). If anything goes in the coffee, it's half&half when we have it. Salty snacks, avoid sugar. I don't even like sweet foods for the most part. I even take calcium supplements and use special enamel strengthening rinses and so on -- and it does not fucking matter. My mother is the same way.

Seriously, this is a little offensive; please drop this assertion that it has to be a shitty diet. It's not. It can be, but that is absolutely not the problem here.

@Jaunt said:

@surreality said:

First, it's generally not an "I" creating a game. This may be assumed but it's worth noting it shouldn't necessarily be. I'm doing a fairly absurd amount of work putting one together now, but I am absolutely not doing it alone. (It's also worth noting that the people who are also contributing their time and energy to the project are folks I've met here for the most part, all of whom have contributed in equally important ways, from my perspective, just for the asking and some volunteered. Others provided advice and tutorials that helped get everything started.)

This is actually pretty big, and it's something that shouldn't be discounted.

That's pretty cool. I've always tended to create games, even MUSH, with a singular partner, not because I dislike working with a larger team, but because it's difficult to find folks who work at the same (crazed) pace that I do. I think that the idea of joint creation/responsibility is one of the cooler defining features of the MUSH community.

I'm pretty much in the same boat on the crazed pace. I'm just... hyper-detail-oriented to the level that most others can keep up pretty easily. (I need three more of me to document everything, I really do, just to get everything out of the brain and into an accessible format.)

The reason I say it's a fusion of both is that, after swapping in 'staff's' for I in the first statement, it tends to be the case. I wouldn't, for instance, put this much time and energy into creating a game I had no interest playing on at some point as well.

This is very true in the other genres of MU*s, too. Not always true, but very often. While it's probably a bit less of a problem with MUSHes because of their social and (usually) non-automated combat systems, I do think it causes problems in other genres (like RPIs): when administrators are also players, I have seen the two following problems eventually destroy many games:

1. They are more dedicated to playing than programming/designing/creating. This is probably less of an issue with MUSHes, since the content creation is more of a communal aspect of the game.

That's a problem on MUSH/MUX as well, or can be. The trick to solving either is hiring people with a sense of responsibility who won't shirk their duties.

2. Because they are so invested in their player characters, and they have the ability to do so, they cheat to get ahead. Cheating has always been a huge problem with MU*s, because there is an important trust-based relationship between player and admin. When that trust is destroyed, it very often ends up in an eventual player exodus, and it's really difficult to re-build.

This definitely happens in both, too -- but again, it has a lot to do with picking the right staff. One of the things I noticed on the MOO was, frankly, a lot of this. It would have been very easy for staff with certain permissions to adjust the damage rating of their weapons, tweak their stats, and so on, in ways that were entirely invisible and thus, people absolutely did it. Advancement was an 'invisible' process there, while it's typically more firmly recorded and noted in many modern MUXes. (Advancement is logged, and if what's logged doesn't match what's there, it becomes obvious enough.)

That's why staff on my games don't play PCs. We test PCs for gameplay purposes, and we observe others' play, and we GM --- but that's something that I always feel strongly about. Even the perception of cheating (even when it might not be true) can ruin the trust between players and administrators in other MU* sub-genres.

It can, and I've seen it happen. I don't think that's a good enough reason to forbid it, primarily because I refuse to allow one paranoid asshole shrieking about how 'cheating could be happening!' even when it's not ruin my experience on a game ever again. Games need staff that aren't burnt out and miserable. What they don't need are paranoid assholes. The former are essential, the latter are toxic in more ways than that. You just need to state up front how things work and be transparent about things, and allow people to make their own decision about whether to play there or not.

But, I also built tools to stop the spawning, or to freeze combat so that we could roleplay scenes together. There was automated player agency to keep players engaged, and there was the ability for scenes of nothing but roleplay, and there was the ability for the later, followed by the former.

This is something we didn't really have access to as an option; but we are talking about a game originally built in... 1993 I think?

If you use automated combat as a feature, and your game cares about roleplay, it's definitely worth it to add in tools to stop automated combat, stop spawning, so that you can engage your players with the same sort of in-depth roleplay that they'd get without those automated systems.

YES.

@surreality said:

The primary benefits I can see in the MUX approach are that a broader range of stories can be told in the same grid space, even if it takes work to provide the hooks to allow for this. It also means the players can find creative solutions at times to problems the code hasn't taken into account, and an automated system may not provide for.

True often, but I don't think it has to be true. RPIs also have dice-rolling mechanics for players to handle situations that automated code might not be able to take into account. And if GMs are good, they will be working to help players bring their plots to realization. I think that the main difference is that players get building tools on MUSHes, whereas on RPIs, players get in-character building crafts/scripts that GM Administrators support by helping those things come to realization, and player-developed plots require collaboration with a GM when something has to happen that goes beyond the player's toolset. It works very well when there is a great, active relationship between the staff and the player-base. It is obviously an annoying bottleneck for games that don't have an active staff.

The bottleneck happens in both, then, yep -- the 'I need a GM/ST!' moment is hard when folks aren't around or available.

It's probably more similar than you might imagine, though. What you describe about players needing staff aid for things that go beyond their toolset is the same -- it's the toolset itself that varies. Most WoD MUSHes lately don't allow build/create access at the player level, for instance, while other games do (or they allow one and not the other, etc.).

And that's why the big difference between the two genres goes back to philosophy, I think:
MUSHes are created more communally. There is less of a divide between staff and players.

It depends on the MUX, in part. Some do allow players to come up with plot -- not all do. It isn't a codebase-long trend, from what I've seen. (I started off on the MOO in 1996, and was on a MUX in... 1997 I think?) "Back in the day" I didn't see players with authority to run plots. I'm not sure when that shift went down to make it somewhat prevalent, but it was during the time I was hiding out on a game that just. didn't. care. (read: Shangrila) from some of the more toxic members of the MUX community. (Mostly, that 'Spider' person mentioned earlier. Long story goes here; tl;dr: she hounds a lot of people right out of the hobby, sometimes for years, sometimes permanently.)

There are also usually limits to the kind of storylines players are permitted to run, vs. what storylines only staff can run. This usually has to do with very high-powered antagonists or metaplot (the larger actions at work in the world that are staff-directed, and proceed over a very long period of time).

A number of players never get involved in plots at all. They're more there for the 'improv' aspect of character immersion.

RPIs put a lot more responsibility on their staff to create content, including content that will immerse players when they're not expecting it.
It's an important distinction, but not a massive one.

There's more pressure to do it, perhaps -- but I think there are different ways to do it, which is partly what I was getting at. WoD is an interesting example in part because it has some actual social mechanics, despite being a game designed for more intrigue-based play rather than adventure-based play. The new(ish) conditions system allows for a lot with this. (I'm biting my tongue since I'm holding back on something spoiler-y on a project or I would go on at more length about some examples of this and how it can be a factor.)

The primary difference I see between the two processes on the creation front isn't the volume of content -- it's the type of content. I find I need to provide more content when it isn't coded than when it is, either to explain the rules for how a thing works, or provide enough options and story hooks to keep going.

(There's more I would add, but... lots of work today. )

@ganymede said in Internet Attacks? Why?:

@surreality said in Internet Attacks? Why?:

He didn't even need to know it was a real address, in my book. He pulled a 'come fight me, I'm here'. He literally invited violence to a location, and... yeah, not knowing what it would lead to isn't much of a defense, in my book.

Defense against what? The decedent doesn't need to put on a defense.

Calling the swat was intentional. That's all you need to show. If you put a bear trap in your background to catch a burglar and it ends up severing the leg of and killing a mailman, that can still be sufficient grounds for an involuntary manslaughter charge.

Not talking about the person who was shot.

An initial party pulled a 'come fight me bro, I'm at this location' -- and gave an address not his own. That person is one of the people I am saying should face a charge, despite not being the one who asked someone to SWAT that address.

Don't ask me, "what can I do to make this better?" and then get twitchy at me when I give you a list of basic suggestions of things you could do that would help without snark, bile, viciousness, or nastiness of any kind because "you don't want to be told what to do".

THEN DON'T FUCKING ASK ME WHAT YOU COULD DO.

I'm not telling you what to do and listing demands, I am answering your motherfucking question: "What could I do?" with things you could do.

Jesus motherfucking christ on fire while pogo-sticking across the Sahara, this is just too fucking much.