Posts made by surreality

@Coin If this does not show up in the background next season, I am going to be disappointed.

Very disappointed.

@Thenomain Swap staff to 'everyone' and it's perfect.

There's some 'apples vs. oranges' going on here from what I can tell.

Mostly, different kinds of investment are being discussed. In either, there can be an investment of emotional energy, attention, and time.

On a M*, there is also the element of a labor requirement. People can take or leave that as passive consumers of media; you can't really passively consume M* content as a player. (There are potential exceptions to this on both ends of the spectrum, but they are atypical.)

Expecting some return on an investment in labor isn't unreasonable.

It may not be the return people want or are hoping to get -- and that's where it starts to get sticky.

A lot of it comes down to expectations. Are people expecting to get matched effort? Get more out than they put in? Get more sometimes and less others? Are they content with less than what they put in? Do they have an inflated idea of what they're putting in, or undervalue what they're getting back? All of these things are potential factors, and many of them exist in the same head at the same time, and some of these things are more reasonable than others.

If the expectation doesn't match the perception of the return, problems can easily arise, and they may, or may not, have anything to do with the objective reality of the situation.

...yup, looks like I made the right call about restrictive create-a-login and guest foo.

Gettin' awful tired of people complaining that we can't have nice things, and then so amply proving why this is so.

I am just going to leave this here, because I laughed, and it seems like the right place.

@Roz That is actually my very, very favorite Shakespeare quote.

@surreality said in Making a MU* of your own:

I don't think I'd, personally, drag a bunch of people into something and do the MUX equivalent of the old movie classic of, "Hey, guys, let's put on a show!"

This hat I'm eating, it's positively full of crow.

@Insomnia I send all the virtual hugs, in spirit. I'm sorry.

@Roz Not the interest -- it's like any other interest in a story. It's the actual defining oneself by what romantic pairing one enjoys that kills me, and that it's just not enough any more to simply like a thing for being enjoyable. Everybody has to join a faction all of a sudden. It makes me really not like liking things as much as I once did.

@Tyche said in Fanbase entitlement:

I think I learned two new terms today..."ship" and "shipper".

I learned those (too long ago) in yon ancient days of livejournal.

I envy you so much right now for those years of blissful ignorance.

@Cupcake said in Fanbase entitlement:

There's this one dude on a game I play on who constantly rants about hating Olicity and what he feels is the over-focus on Felicity in general to the point where he calls it "Felicity and Friends".

I would watch the shit out of "Felicity and Friends". Can we have that? Can that actually be a thing, maybe? Because all that needs is a dash of cheeky Merlin banter and some Flash cast cameos thrown in once in a while to be totally worth it.

Now I gotta grump some because we will probably never get that, but dangit... I want it now. Really kinda a lot. Why can't that be a thing? <sigh>

The wiki stuff from BITN -- at least some of it thus far -- is backed up for grabbing. It really was made to be stuff for everyone who wanted to use it. It's not in ready to use form (yet, and will not be for a while because I do not have time to explain things or walk people through it right now please do not ask yet) but a good portion of the wiki templates and such are safe.

<2 @SunnyJ Thank you!

@ThatGuyThere For what it's worth, even I do not actually know, and I'm staff. So. I have a feeling that if people are keeping it private, it's going to stay that way. As folks are not muck-raking at one another about it (basically, being adults enough that even other staff don't know), it's probably best to leave it be.

I can say this much: as staff, there were no gigantic explosions that I know of/were pointed out to me as the cause.

@Pyrephox said in Bump In The Night: A Chronicles of Darkness MUX:

I loved the premise, and only left because of my own flakiness. It's a shame to see it pass - I hope that someone else revives the idea of a mortals game - I might suggest one that covers less geography, though.

In the wake of BITN closing, I'm setting aside my other project to pick up the mortals game I'd been kicking around for a while that I set aside for BITN. (Two mortals games would have been, I think, too diluted, so it got shelved at the time; it's a niche, and not a big niche.)

There will be something, eventually. I don't think it will necessarily appeal to the same target audience, but there will be something for the die-hard mortal crowd, even if it takes some time to get there.

As a quick note, the current install on DigitalOcean for mediawiki droplets will bork itself with almost any change to LocalSettings.php without a tweak.

After the database portion of the file, you'll want to add:

$wgCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";

...stick it right under $wgUpgradeKey and things unbreak again. Figured someone else would run into this one until whatever the next version is that goes in, and better if only one of us has to beat our head against the wall searching up error strings for an hour of head-desking.

For what it's worth, I'm tinkering with something similar to the 'player login + other' idea. It involves multiple logins rather than puppets -- mostly since puppets can get hairy in MUX and people tend to be somewhat distrustful of them due to a history of spying with them -- but I like this idea. (A friend of mine and I had considered a multi-setting game, though it's stalled out for the moment while I hash out system and policy and code and such crap on my own for the next, uh, year or so.)

We're looking at some fairly different stuff regarding the player login concept if it's any help; I can pass along the notes if you like, though it's rough enough that it's not 'ready for prime time' here.

@Apos Also hilariously close to the hobby:

I was with him more closely than I have ever been in this novel; his voice was as powerful for me as I’ve ever heard it. I experienced break through after break through as I walked with him, moved with him, saw through his eyes. What I ask of Lestat, Lestat unfailingly gives. For me, three hunting scenes, two which take place in hotels — the lone woman waiting for the hit man, the slaughter at the pimp’s party — and the late night foray into the slums –stand with any similar scenes in all of the chronicles. They can be read aloud without a single hitch. Every word is in perfect place. The short chapter in which Lestat describes his love for Rowan Mayfair was for me a totally realized poem. There are other such scenes in this book. You don’t get all this? Fine. But I experienced an intimacy with the character in those scenes that shattered all prior restraints, and when one is writing one does have to continuously and courageously fight a destructive tendency to inhibition and restraint. Getting really close to the subject matter is the achievement of only great art. Now, if it doesn’t appeal to you, fine. You don’t enjoy it? Read somebody else. But your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander.

...we have all known that player.

At least I think we have a good target quote to demonstrate "overly invested", now, though! So I'd call that a win.

@Coin I am not entirely kidding that if an 80s game ever becomes a thing, that quote is going to become key to the development of at least one antagonist.

( ...or would that be an Annetagonist? <runs and hides>)

@Coin said in RL things I love:

Anne Rice imbulbiated all over the Amazon.com review section in 2004.

(I just read this again. Hilarious.)

I am keeping the shit out of "you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max" forever.

@Roz said in Making a MU* of your own:

I've had players get mortally insulted at the idea that staff is not in the business of making every player happy.

This is, I think, part of the reason the 'customer service model' for staffing is not particularly viable.

...especially because there are plenty of players who will never be happy no matter what you do (or don't do, or do to someone else, or don't do to someone else, etc.).